"We’ve landed some of our largest long-term contracts in the last three to six months so we’ve got a lot of visibility into growth next year and are really optimistic," Belcher told PrintWeek in an exclusive interview.
Managed print services has suddenly become a hot category. Not only are there regional printers leveraging their own presses to enter the space for smaller companies with $1m plus annual printing spends, but larger providers of enterprise software-as-a-service solutions for Fortune 500 companies are also considering print as an addition to their current enterprise offerings.
"We see more entrants on both sides of the marketplace and I expect we’ll continue to see new people in this space for many years to come," Belcher noted. "I’m not necessarily concerned, though I hope these new entrants are good at what they do to continue to reinforce the benefits of managing the supply chain the way we and others are doing it.
"It’s a very large market, and we do feel that over time, this managed print solution is what this global industry is going to evolve into. There’s plenty of room for additional entrants."
InnerWorkings recently posted impressive Q3 results that included a 27% rise in revenue over the same period in 2011 to $199.8m, and 19% organic revenue growth. The company noted that year-to-date new enterprise account growth has reached 77%, up 17% over the same period last year.
Currently about 81% of the InnerWorkings revenue is generated by US domestic sales, while 19% is derived from international sales activity. But Belcher said that international revenue had more than doubled since last year, though he emphasized that increase is not due to any specific region.
"We’re not really thinking about the market in terms of one region or another," he explained. "We’re thinking about it in terms of a global corporation using a single provider to manage their brand and their materials in all major markets that they do business in. So we advocate global contracts and I think we’re going to see substantial growth in all the markets."
Belcher is a realist and notes that not all portions of commercial printing will fare well over the next decade. But he does suggest that outside of newspaper, periodicals and books, most commercial print will hold steady.
"I don't think we'll see meaningful growth it the print categories we’re in over the next five to 10 years, but I don’t think we’ll see decline either," he elaborated. "It’s about a half a trillion annual global business and my guess is that in five to 10 years it will be around that as well."
