As EFI Connect celebrates its 20th anniversary, new CEO Bill Muir took to the stage to greet the users at the annual conference in Las Vegas. During his keynote speech, he emphasised EFI’s commitment to ‘keeping the innovation engine alive and well’.
Joking that this was Day 99 of his employment and that he was expected to take responsibility for everything from Day 100, Mr Muir focused on the accelerating rate of change that technology has brought in the last 30 years, saying that technology develops exponentially while businesses grow logarithmically, which can lead to a potentially dangerous ‘bifurcation’ between a company and its customers
While giving away nothing in terms of specific product announcements, he praised the ‘managerial courage’ it had taken to pivot EFI’s business from the original Fiery platform via the Print Café project of the early 2000s to the company’s success in the wide-format sector in more recent years. He pointed out that the rumours of print’s demise had been exaggerated and that although the industry’s total value has yet to reach the peak of 2007, it has been growing consistently at a compound rate of 1.5% since 2011.
Within that headline figure are some contradictory trends: while litho dropped by nearly 47% between 2006 and 2018, digital print almost doubled in value and value-added services grew by just over 40%. The latter category currently represents around a fifth of sales and is expected to grow to a quarter in two years, so it’s not hard to see where EFI will focus its efforts. Quoting a range of business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and more unexpectedly, Michelangelo, Mr Muir stressed that his responsibility was to help keep the innovations coming to help EFI’s customers in their businesses. By focusing on company culture and ‘customer obsession’, he said that the third factor that he had to worry about – capital – ‘would take care of itself’.
Later on Mr Muir sat down for a fireside chat with EFI customer Freeman Company’s CEO Joe Popolo to talk about creating engaging brand experiences and the significant role captivating visuals play in grabbing the attention of audiences.
