HP to ramp up digital printing offering

By Brenda Gazzar

TEL AVIV, March 10 (Reuters) - Personal computer and printer maker Hewlett Packard (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it was moving forward with a plan to ramp up digital printing offerings as part of a trend towards a reduction in analogue printing.

Fresh off a number of key acquisitions, HP launched a series of graphic arts products and technologies to enhance digital printing, saying it aims to be "the global leader in digital graphic arts".

"We are going to lead the (transformation) of moving from analogue to digital," Yariv Avisar, vice president and general manager of large format printing industrial solutions for HP's Imaging and Printing Group, told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Tel Aviv.

"This conversion is ... our main strategy," he said. "All these acquisitions and products and activities that we are doing is mainly to accelerate this conversion."

In its most recent acquisition, HP last week completed its $118.4 million purchase of Israel's NUR Macroprinters, a maker of industrial wide-format digital inkjet printers.

While only about 9 percent of all pages in the world are printed digitally, digital pages are growing at a much faster rate than analogue ones, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president of Graphics and Imaging Business at HP.

"We're on the cusp with a lot of the sort of innovation coming from HP and others in the industry so that you'll see an acceleration of the shift from analog to digital," he said. "That shift mostly will happen in the graphics base."

HP officials estimated that about 25 percent of the global signage market is done by digital printers.