The show is to return to the Birmingham NEC as part of a strategy that Informa hopes will breathe new life into the Ipex brand.

As part of the revamp, which is centred on what Hall describes as an “innovative” partnership with Picon and the NEC, the show will move to a three-year cycle, mirroring Drupa, although Informa Exhibitions managing director Peter Hall stressed that the new Ipex would be a UK-focused event.

He said that while Informa had looked at making the show biennial or annual, the triennial cycle best reflected the ambition to make Ipex “a large-scale event" that "features heavily on machinery, equipment and technology and companies investing in showing working machinery”.

“While I’m sure visitors would like to see that every year, at the end of the day it’s the manufacturers that make that happen and they’re the ones that constrain us to a longer frequency,” said Hall.

The show was originally slated for spring 2018, but will now take place in autumn 2017, although the duration and precise timing of the event is yet to be finalised by the Ipex Joint Executive Committee (JEC).

The JEC is made up of representatives from Informa, Picon, the NEC and UK-based exhibitors Apex, FFEI, Friedheim and Watkiss.

The first formal meeting was held in September.

“There is a strong appetite from UK suppliers, manufacturers and visitors for a major event every three years which keeps pace with the speed of change in the industry, does not conflict with Drupa and very much complements a variety of annual UK signage, packaging and print shows,” said Picon chief executive Bettine Pellant.

Informa is currently assembling a team to drive the event, but has already appointed Rob Fisher, director, materials handling group of Informa’s SHD Logistics business as event director. Fisher has been working with Dubai-based Hall on Ipex for just over a year.

Regarding the decision to return Ipex to the NEC, Hall said it was the obvious choice of venue for a UK-centric show, despite Informa previously committing Ipex to London’s Excel for several cycles as part of the 2014 move.

“When we wanted the show to be funded internationally, London was the right play. But when we look at a play focused on the UK as its target market, then the NEC is the better choice. The prior commitment to the Excel was not more important than the right location for the next event.”

While the details are still being ironed out, Informa has booked Hall 5 at the NEC, which is around 30,000sqm. However, Hall added that within the contract with the NEC, Informa has the flexibility to go “bigger or smaller”.

For the first time the event will have a maximum stand size, although Hall said the figure was yet to be finalised and was subject to discussions with “major exhibitors”.

Similarly the show will most likely be either four or five days, depending on feedback.

“We’re trying to move away from the legacy norms of the past. We were designed to accommodate litho presses, so we needed a month tenancy, which then dictated our pricing level. We need to talk to exhibitors and find out what machinery will come to Ipex and work back from there for the duration,” said Hall.

He added that Informa would spend the time between now and Drupa talking to the market to finalise its plans, but wouldn’t necessarily be looking to sign up exhibitors until around May next year.

“We’ll move this process at the speed the industry is happy to move at,” said Hall. He said that potential clashes with other UK events, such as this week’s The Print Show, were not a concern as annual UK events had a different focus.

“Our focus is on scale and representation of the full UK industry and equipment demonstrations, that’s why partnering with Picon and the NEC is so important, because we have to focus on how we do that cost-effectively for exhibitors and the NEC is crucial to that.”

Fisher added that now that the NEC was under private ownership, it had relaxed rules over having events in the same market within three months of each other.

“I think the NEC now takes the view that exhibitors will choose which is the best show for them to exhibit at, so they will let the market decide to an extent,” said Fisher.

According to Hall, Informa had briefly considered dropping the Ipex name.

“Immediately after the show [in 2014] we felt that Ipex was a word that had a lot of baggage, but as time passes perception of major brands change and now people are now almost completely in favour of us keeping the Ipex name, to demonstrate that it will remain what it always was: the major print show for the UK.

Informa acquired Ipex from Picon in 2006, prior to that it had run the event under a management contract from Picon, the trade body of UK printing equipment manufacturers and suppliers.

Informa began talking to Picon in early 2014 about possible formats for a new-look show, following what Hall described as an unsuccessful 2014 event, which was blighted by the withdrawals of major manufacturers including Heidelberg, HP, and Xerox.

“We had an unenviable situation in 2014 where the rules of engagement changed mid cycle, once we already had heaps of commitments to the way the show was going to be run and we had lots of legacy constraints, because the show always had certain features and expectations,” said Hall.

According to Hall, in the run-up to 2014, while Informa’s primary focus was on delivering an event that did justice to the Ipex brand, it was already thinking of what the show needed to look like in the future.

Part of the strategy was to kill off the North Print & Pack and Cross Media events and make the bulk of the Ipex team redundant after the  2014 event.

“We had to stop the music, and we’ve now been through a well structured, albeit time-consuming, process with Picon to get to the position to where we can say what we’ll be doing,” he said.