Don’t commit suicide by doing 200 copies on offset machines which were meant to produce 20,000 copies!
The 5th in the MCOP series of webinars by All India Federation of Master Printers (AIFMP) & PRESSIdeas titled Mastering the Science & Art of Digital Printing. Mr.Satish Malhotra opened the session with special appreciation for the visionary man – Mr. Manoj Mehta, the past president of AIFMP – behind the conceptualisation and great success of these knowledge seminars on the virtual platform for the print industry.
The subject of each and every MCOP was very thoughtfully selected and the corresponding best speakers were arranged. The interest aroused in the printers has been so much that the organisers had to increase the Bandwidth to accommodate the increasing number of industry people joining the Webinars.
The 5th MCOP took place on Jul 26 2025. The topic was “Mastering the Science & Art of Digital Printing”. Today, Digital Printing is instrumental in driving the transformation the print industry. It is rather a significant technology which is shaping the future of print. One of the best teams from the leading company Hewlett Packard led the attendees of the webinar to navigate and transform their businesses with Digital Printing.
Mr. Manoj Mehta, the Chairman of MCP, in his keynote address pointed out how Digital Printing is reshaping our industry today. “It is not just about faster, smaller print run anymore; it is about personalization, smart packaging, workflow automation and creating new business models for every printer,” he underlined. Digital offers a huge opportunity, but only if we learn to blend creativity with technology. Mastering Digital Printing is about precision, consistency and delivering high-value solutions that go beyond ink on paper and that is where HP is the master.
The session focused on three key areas: how digital can grow your business; how to ensure quality and colour consistency; and how digital can create unique customer experiences.
Mr. Yoav Lotan, Manager, APJ Products & Solutions, HP Industrial Print, in his presentation, spoke about ‘The Digital Journey. The Nonstop Future. The AI Advantage.’ We know that the digital revolution started with the common saying, ‘everything that can become digital will become digital and printing is no exception’. That vision has today become a reality. Today HP Indigo is leading the market in commercial print products, labels and – with the most recent penetration – in packaging. Digital not only is bringing production quality and versatility but is also seen as a solution for what customers really want for the future. To talk more of Digital Printing, it is a smarter printing environment, more automated, faster from order to fulfilment and has remarkable scalability. “We are really looking at a transformation that we want to bring around non-stop digital printing and enabling our customers with many more possibilities,” says Mr. Yoav Lotan.
HP is planning to do that by establishing a clear strategy around its markets, especially in Asia. Beyond labels, commercial and flexible packaging, it has many sub segments like heat transfer labels, security printing etc. Speaking about AI, HP leads by designing the product and engineering them all the way to how they operate on the production flow of its customers. It enables its customers to automate many steps of what they do on the machine as well as in the production flow. “At the end of day, we intend to create an autonomous production and autonomous press that can run 24 hours a day and be almost self-sustained,” says Lotan.
HP has expanded the capabilities of the prints – done more partnerships around autonomous and mobile production and robots that are part of the future production flow. It has launched new products like the 18K and 120 K in the commercial space. It has scaled activities around labels and flexible packaging. The HP Indigo press portfolio has presses complementing the analogue and offset printing in the commercial printing.
HP Indigo is leading the Digital Labels market with 50% market share and over 2300 active presses. Similarly in the packaging and flexible packaging there is a great opportunity in the Indian market. “We have actually doubled our business in flexible packaging and we have the line of sight to continue and do it for the next few years. More than 400 presses are installed around the world and over 100 presses are in Asia.
HP Indigo is enabling customers to do what they want, when they want and just to do more with the digital solution that they invest in.
Next, Mr.Steven Chow took over from Lotan. He is Regional Commercial Category Manager, HP Indigo, Asia Pacific and Japan. He spoke on the topic ‘NextAI in Automation’. In Digital Printing business, we get more jobs but they are shorter runs and have challenges like getting skilled labour, consumables and all other costs. Then there are market pressure and other unpredictable causes, uncertainty regarding skill to run high-tech equipment, profitability & sustainability of business and technology becoming obsolete too fast. “The answer to these challenges is Intelligent Automation,” said Steven. It brings real time monitoring of production, can do autonomous ordering, reception, job management, predictive analysis and keep track of processes and supply chain. “The whole idea to reduce the human touch point and make production workflow seamless,” adds Steven. He discussed in detail the end-to-end production automation by HP highlighting PQ Maestro and HP PrintOS.
Next presentation was by Ms.Miin Wong, Business Development, HP Indigo. She spoke on ‘Next Wave in Digital Innovation’. She discussed areas where intelligent creativity is enabled by HP in Innovation Creative Tools. “Digital Printing by HP is an enabler for brand storytelling. It addresses the key challenge brands are facing today while connecting with consumers who are overexposed with marketing messages in their lives,” asserted Miin. “Our objective here is to inspire purpose-led branding through HP Digital Print.
With HP Indigo Exclusive Brands innovation services, you have the right technology and HP expertise to coach and support salespeople from the customers’ team in selling digital and also supporting it with open house. “The Digital Printing of the future, powered by AI tools, will enable brands to produce hyper-personalized, sustainable and visually dynamic content at unprecedented speed and scale. AI will automate design generation, optimize print workflows and connect data driven insights directly to on-demand production – turning every print into a smart, targeted experience. The fusion of creativity, intelligence and agility will redefine how brands engage, produce and innovate. The future is already happening now. I welcome you all to be on this journey with the HP team to print the future,” concluded Miin Wong.
The next presentation was from Mr.Appadurai A, HP Country Manager, India. He started with ‘Small is New Big: India Startup Explosion’. He started by declaring, “In the overall printing space, no one has a portfolio like what HP does in the commercial print arena, in the labels, in the packaging side of the business and also in the publishing.”
He said, everybody else in this printing space talks about having AI. But, for AI to be functional, we need functional solutions behind it. “To be functional and really go to the next level in AI, you need a strong idea on HP. It is the largest IT company in the world. It is also the largest in the printing space by the way. And this is what makes a big difference,” he smiles. “Compare us with anybody else in this space. They’re all in printing; they might get to a little bit of AI. Being an IT company, which is also in printing and has the biggest portfolio, AI in Printing is going to be real functional here,” he adds.
“India, if not already, will become the startup capital of the world,” continued Appadurai supporting with the country’s population data which showed 65% of India being less than 35 years of age and 53% of them under 25 wanting to own some kind of business in their lifetime.
Large companies are now getting challenged by smaller companies. The way people are buying products is also changing. From the neighbourhood Kirana to supermarket to e commerce to today’s quick commerce it has seen changing habits of buyers. Quick commerce is revolutionizing the way commerce is happening in our country. These small brands aren’t the one who can afford the minimum order quantity that printers have been asking for. They can’t wait much for deliveries. And this altogether is pushing a lot of people to consider digital today.
HP, on its part is meeting thousands of small startup companies regularly by various incubation centres countrywide. The platforms get them to these startups where they explain them the benefits of short-run digital printing and packaging. “All of these translate as volume to our users and today the people who are investing in digital go from zero to a million impression in record timelines, which was not the case before. It is happening today,” stated Appadurai.
He concluded with an interesting quiz session where he explained how digital printing can turn unprofitable short-run jobs of non-digital processes to profitable ones. “It’s the time you stop saying, ‘I can print 200 copies in offset, cheaper and faster’,” he warned.
There are a lot of more benefits of printing digitally. One small example is the security printing capabilities of digital are enormous. It can turn thousands of crores being lost to counterfeiters to profits.
To experience what the knowledge session covered in full detail, you may click on this link: 5TH MCOP WEBINAR
