FIERY TO MEET CHANGING NEEDS: HECKENBERG
Craig Heckenberg, managing director of Epson Australia, says the company’s monster $875m (US$591m) acquisition of Fiery will set the company and its customers up for the future.
In the biggest print deal of the year, Epson is buying the business that has, along with Apple and Adobe, done more to change print probably since Gutenberg himself.
Heckenberg said, “The acquisition of Fiery aligns with our long-term vision of driving innovation and delivering enhanced value to our customers.
“By combining Fiery's industry leading products and expertise with our proven technologies and capabilities in digital printing, we are positioning ourselves to meet the changing needs of our customers and accelerate growth in key areas of our business”.
Fiery is the world’s leading rip and workflow developer, its products are available to drive digital presses from the world’s big developers including Canon, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, and the new Landa nanographic presses. Testament to the influence of Fiery is evidenced by the fact that there have been two million of the company's rips installed around the world.
In a world where there are multiple rips to choose from, and the cutsheet press manufacturers all sell their own, the Fiery remains the go-to for commercial print operators.
Epson doesn’t have a commercial cutsheet print system, although its wide format printers use a Fiery rip, unlike cutsheet there are half a dozen other third party rips available for wide-format printers. Epson manufactures an increasing range of digital print systems, including its wide-format printers, label presses, textile presses, DTG and DTF systems, promotional products, merchandising printers, and micro presses. Epson had sales revenues of $13.75bn in the last financial year, and has some 75,000 staff.
The Fiery rip originally enabled much of the digital colour printing movement, making it possible for what were essentially office photocopiers to print colour with fidelity and consistency. With a price tag a fifth the price of a multi-colour A3 offset press, and with inline finishing and green button operation, they wiped out the A3 offset press market in little more than a decade.
Fiery was originally created by legendary print technology developer Efi Arazi, who founded electronic page make-up developer Scitex, in 1968, it was Israel’s first ever high-tech business. At its peak Scitex had annual revenues of US$900m and 4000 employees.
Ever the visionary – Arazi was the co-developer of the television camera the Apollo 11 crew used to broadcast the first pictures of the moon – he saw the writing on the wall for the $1m+ Scitex systems when the $5000 Apple Mac appeared, sold the business to Robert Maxwell, and in 1988 formed EFI, developing the Fiery rip as its main product.
Arazi died in 2013, aged 76, after suffering Alzheimer’s disease. The EFI business was bought by Siris private equity fund five years ago and split into its three sides: EFI wide format systems; the MIS and workflow operation which was sold to another p/e fund and is now eProductivity Software; and the Fiery business, now sold to Epson.