The company, which has subsidiaries in France, Switzerland, Italy and the UK, as well as its main operation in Germany, is owned by photo and online print service giant CEWE.
Saxoprint managing director, Daniel Ackermann, said he believed there was huge opportunity to drive existing commercial and wide-format trade business in the UK online, mirroring the trend seen in Germany over the past decade.
“Germany has the potential for €15bn, the whole printing market, with a potential of €5bn of which can go online. Our estimation is that €1.2bn or €1.3bn is currently online, with the theoretical potential of €3.8bn to go,” he told PrintWeek during an exclusive interview.
“We think the UK online market could be €10 to €11bn, with theoretically €3bn to go online. We see €150m is already online, so €2.8bn to go online. The market is big. It's off-line right now, it's conventional. Our task is to bring it online."
Saxoprint, which has a 18,000sqm production facility in Dresden, Germany running a 24/5 shift pattern, moving to 24/7 during peak times, thinks it will be the UK market leader in online trade print within the next few years.
Currently the mature German market represents 60% of Saxoprint’s turnover, which Ackermann said was on course to achieve its aim of €100m next year, but it expects foreign sales to reach 50% of total turnover in a year and 60% the year after that.
Saxoprint believes it will win market share through a blend of marketing, native know-how and German efficiency. It is able to offer keen prices through a focus on a fixed product list and batch printing optimisation, with the aim to fill each AO sheet with print, often from different countries at the same time, and a slick pre-press, finishing and dispatch operation.
Two years ago it shifted strategy, adopting ‘Human Touch to Online Printing’ as its slogan and headhunted UK senior key account manager Philip Foster for its west London office, near Heathrow Airport, where 30 multilingual operatives cover orders from UK, France, Italy and Spain. A similar team works on Germany, Austria and Switzerland from Dresden.
Foster, who previously owned litho print and print broker businesses before joining Saxoprint, said: “We are really only scratching the surface of the UK market and the potential that’s within the UK market, and the French market."
Foster intends to further encourage UK printers, print brokers and agencies to hand over standard litho work to be printed by Saxoprint in Dresden. Saxoprint also offers wide-format events and signage digital work through another German printer, and is increasing its packaging offering.
He said that printers are increasingly keen to be seen as “a one-stop shop” to clients, for fear of losing them to a competitor as a result of that one job they cannot do. Therefore they can concentrate on core products and act as a print broker to clients, while making a profit on the sale.
The company does not like to reveal its plant list, which features Heidelberg Speedmasters with eight-colour perfector, KBA Rapidas and finishing kit, but Ackermann did say it runs more than 100 print units in total.
Saxoprint UK was established in July 2007. Sales were £407,379 in its first year and £1.27m its second. By 2014 sales had risen to £5.4m from £4.3m in 2013.
