Year-on-year growth

Introduce yourself and your role at Mimaki

My name is Mark Sollman and I am product manager EMEA at Mimaki. I’ve been working for this beautiful company for 16 years so it is running through my veins. I’m responsible for product management which includes the launching of new products, the creating of product guides and sales guides, and helping to train our partners and employees.  

Please give us an overview of what Mimaki offers as a company

We see it in four segments. We have Textile and Apparel (TA), Sign Graphics (SG), Industrial Products which for us is the UV flatbed technology, and we have a new emerging market which is the full colour 3D which we call the 3D market. We are responsible for creating and launching new machines in all these markets. So if you come to a show or to our showroom we almost have a solution for everybody. Whether it’s for small UV, textile, sublimation, reactive, solvents – everything.

What presence did Mimaki have at FESPA 2022 and what kit were you demonstrating?

First of all, we were very happy with the location of the stand which was in one of the first halls. It was directly catching the attention of people as soon as they came in. Internally, we are always trying to be better than the latest show. We have a lot of people working internally with the marketing team, applications, and even technicians to get it better than the previous show which in this case was Amsterdam.

For our presence this year we worked with a designer and started from a painting. We then created this painting using all the diversity of the machines. Be it solvent, or UV, or leather, everything was available to print on. Then in the middle we had the customer gallery and inside people could see what you can do with the machines.

Everyone is showing machines, but we like to go one step further and show more applications, and we especially like to look at customers and what they are doing with our machines. We really feel that from FESPA, people would like to invest. Through seeing our showroom and experience gallery they can see that there are other applications for them to investigate through investing in new machines. That works really well for us.

Is it important that manufacturers show what customers could be doing with the machines as well as just showing the actual hardware?

Yes, that is correct. It is not a secret that we have a lot of good competition. I like to call them colleagues. Everybody is getting to a better level of application and maintenance. There are not as many bad machines in the market as there were a few years ago. So it is really important to show what you can do with the machine and how it runs, and next to that we are very proud of our business model. We have trained employees working at all our partners speaking the language. If we sell a machine in the Czech Republic, the technician can speak that language. I think that’s also very important.

In terms of how the show went, what was the response to your stand and how was the show for you?

I just heard this morning that there was around 50% less visitors than Amsterdam, around 12,500 which is not so much. But we had a feeling that we gathered a lot of leads and had a lot of interest in the machines, and we still need to see if this has resulted in sales generation later. But the impression of the show and everyone’s feeling was that it was a really, really good show. And it’s also necessary for people to feel and touch the machines again because it doesn’t work in our industry only to use webinars and virtual meetings.

There were a lot of key themes running through FESPA such as sustainability. Generally, on a more company-wide angle, what are some of the key themes that are driving Mimaki’s operations at the moment?

We are an innovative company and for example, we had the introduction of our 330 series which is a machine which is coming from a cross-platform technology. We have introduced a solvent with an integrated cutter and we also have a textile version, on the same platform. Next to that we have listened to our customers and we also now have an integrated X and Y cutter so we can finish the machine totally.

You can print and there will be a poster cut out of the machine. The market is demanding more from a machine than only print and finishing alone. Next to that, it's the diversity of  UV inks that we have. We know that you cannot only work with one type of ink. You have to look at each application and what is needed – does it need to be flexible? Or hard? So we have a diverse range of inks for all materials and that is also something that is a strength.

You mentioned that 3D printing is a fairly new market for Mimaki. Is this something that you see the company focusing on in the future?

Yes for sure. It is for us an emerging market and it’s not a secret that it still costs a lot of money because it needs to be grown and expanded. But if you look at the quality and the knowledge that we have gained over the last few years, this saw the introduction of the new Mimaki 3DUJ-2207 which is a smaller 3D full colour machine. From our customers we also learned that we needed a really clear and bright varnish or clear liquid. That’s why we also introduced this on the bigger machine which is the 553. It is about learning the 3D market. It’s not about cost price of the material or of the product. For example, if we are making a model for a boat company, it’s not about the cost of the model, it’s more about the cost of helping a customer to invest in a bigger potential. It’s a different kind of process with this market.

Mimaki recently reported that it is experiencing significant year-on-year growth. What do you think are the key factors causing this growth?

Stability of the machines. Stability of the company. It’s not a secret that next to our colleagues we have also had some issues with supply, but we’ve learned a lot. We built our own ink factory in Europe, we are manufacturing our machines in Italy, we’ve tried to change the structure and workflow a little bit. This will have helped. It also helps that people are searching more and more for machines that are reliable and that can print unattended. I think this is something we see in our growth.

Is there anything you would like to add?

The customer gallery element of our stand at FESPA is something we’d like to go and expand further because there’s a story to tell. It also helps us a lot that if we work with designers and fashion designers, we learn a lot about what they find difficult and what their challenges are. If we work with a designer, they say ‘I just want to print on everything’. Well, that doesn’t work. For textile pigment you need to print onto cotton, for sublimation it’s polyester, and it’s about learning from both sides. It's really interesting for us and it also helps us to know more about the market and what is needed for the end-users.

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