Last week we opened the doors to our first venture into Africa – FESPA Africa 2014.
We’ve been looking at the African print region for some time now and last year, in partnership with South African event organiser Practical Publishing, we took the step of launching the first FESPA Africa, incorporating Sign Africa and Visual Communications Africa, the region’s leading events for the sign industry.
For many years Africa wasn’t seen as a region of opportunity in our sector. However, in the past decade the combined GDP of the continent’s 54 countries has expanded more quickly each year than the global average. This healthy economic environment presents numerous possibilities for wide format printers with a view to grow their businesses.
Africa is a vital and exciting growth region. Speaking with local printers, they too are seeing the positive development in this industry. Where once screen printing would have been undertaken in the south and shipped north, nowadays run lengths are declining, market trends are changing and people are now printing more digitally, often closer to the point of need.
There are still challenges facing print service providers (PSPs) in Africa, such as lack of finance to invest in new technology across the continent, high import duties, unreliable power supplies and the lack of availability of certain substrates and media in some African countries. But, despite the fact that Africa isn’t a mature market, it’s keeping up to date with global advances and seeing growth in areas we also see here in the developed economies, such as soft signage and digital textile.
Out-of-Home (OOH) is also an expanding market: from billboards and soft signage to vehicle wraps, the scope is huge. One of the reasons for this increase is the amount of time consumers spend travelling each day. Covering long distances, people spend a good amount of time exposed to OOH media, creating a worthwhile opportunity for media and business owners.
With FESPA Africa, we’ve added another piece to the FESPA global event jigsaw. Our strategy towards emerging global markets is to work with a supportive partner who can blend FESPA’s brand recognition, organisational strengths and world-class content programmes with local knowledge. This approach has already served us well in Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and China.
FESPA Africa 2014 covered 13500sqm and brought together the whole wide format supply chain including signage, wide format digital printing, garment decoration and screen printing. An important focus at all of our events is our educational features and these played a prominent part in the visitor experience at FESPA Africa. With vehicle wrapping gaining traction in the region Speedwrap allowed visitors to take part and race against the clock to wrap a vehicle door.
Apparel and promotional wear is also growing in Africa and our garment workshop gave printers the chance to learn different techniques to decorate garments from t-shirt print guru, Charlie Taublieb.
The Explore Technology Conference provided high quality content each day from industry specialists examining themes from colour management, workflow and future trends in digital wide format print.
With these word-class features, major international exhibitors and a wealth of innovation and applications to discover, there was certainly plenty for visitors to explore at FESPA Africa 2014.
