The inkjet developer has just reported on a somewhat turbulent 2024, with results that met its revised expectations.
Overall sales were down 13% at £61.4m, while adjusted EBITDA fell by 42% to £3.7m.
The adjusted profit before tax was £300,000, compared to £2.9m the prior year.
Xaar reduced operating expenses by 16% to £21.6m, but maintained R&D spend at around 9% of sales.
The group’s reported loss of £10.7m included a £5.6m hit on the expected earn-out from the sale of Xaar 3D to Israeli firm Stratasys, which has been impacted by the conflict in the region.
FFEI, acquired in 2021, has now been completely integrated into Xaar’s Printhead division with the Hemel Hempstead site closed.
Net cash increased by 23% to £8.7m.
Xaar’s new ‘turnkey’ solution is designed to help OEMs commercialise products more quickly.
It has been used by textiles specialist M&R Printing Equipment on its new Polaris S4 Pretreat Unit, with the turnaround from concept to first customer sale taking just six months. Xaar said this process would previously have taken around three years on average.
COO Graham Tweedale told Printweek that a number of significant new market opportunities had opened up for its Printhead division.
“There’s a lot of positivity particularly around high viscosity. We’ve now got ink companies understanding what high viscosity means and developing fluids. We’ve got people seeing what that means in application, and we’ve got people with machines in the market that are using that capability,” he said.
“After a lot of hard work over the past few years, we’re now selling machines on the back of what it can do and that bodes well for the future.”
The new markets include EV battery coating, where inkjet coating addresses safety concerns around wrapping these types of batteries in plastic film. Xaar is the first firm to come to market with a printhead specifically for this application, and said the market could potentially generate as much as £260m in revenues.
In automotive coating inkjet tech is being used by partner Axalta on its NextJet digital painting machine.
In turn Axalta has a partnership with market leader car painting system specialist Dürr.
The system eliminates the need to mask off different areas of a vehicle for two-tone spray painting, and opens up the potential for bespoke detailing that customers would specify at the time of ordering.
Xaar cited numerous benefits over decals and car wrapping, as the paint sits underneath the topcoat.
Xaar will receive a revenue stream based on the number of cars painted.
“For every 1% of the global car market, or 900,000 cars annually that are painted using our technology, we would generate significant revenue and profit for Xaar before factoring in any market growth,” the group stated.
Thirdly, Xaar technology is being used by Flashforge in its new, low-cost desktop 3D colour printer, which is priced at around £2,400, potentially opening up a new market in that space.
“Overall, these three markets each represent revenue opportunities of a magnitude greater than the ceramics market, illustrating the process of de-risking our business model over a relatively short period of time. Crucially, in all these markets, there are now fully operational machines using our printheads,” Xaar stated.
In addition, Xaar tech is being used by Flashforge in the wax printing market, used for products such as jewellery, which it said was of a similar potential scale to the textiles market.
Xaar shares rose on the news and were up 11.67% at 67.00p at the time of writing (52-week high: 150.50p, low: 57.60p).
