What a Year for Sports and Print
The past year held many surprises across America. When the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, they demonstrated what it means to overcome years of status quo while teaching us that skill and persistence pays off, surprising many fans and baseball experts alike. When Fiji won their first Olympic Gold Medal in Rio 2016, it showed us that anything is possible with the right effort, talent and teamwork!
Likewise, it was a great year for print. Overcoming many pre-conceived notions from the past 25 years, digital print has now become mainstream. It is common to run jobs digitally that were previously “impossible” using conventional offset equipment. Leading retail brands across all industries are demanding higher quality graphics, event-based packaging – like World Series beverages – and micro versioning more than ever before. Every wall in our cities and airports are covered with images and graphics, as well as our buses and transit stations. This “print renaissance” is creating an explosion in demand for the graphic print technologies that HP offers.
Looking back at drupa 2016, HP delivered an gold medal/world series winning graphics solutions performance. Key players included our flag ship Indigo 50000, a fully refreshed lineup of HP Latex printers, our new HDNA 2400 dpi resolution PageWide Presses, our PrintOS cloud based print management platform, and numerous application solutions to support these new presses. These solutions are all available today for commercial production, and are already helping our customers win Olympic Gold in their respective businesses.
So whatever your favorite sport is, by any scoring criteria it was clearly a championship year for HP Graphics. I would like to thank all my teammates, our customers, and our partners for sharing in our success, and wish you health, prosperity, and peace this holiday season. Hope you get some time off to celebrate and relax with family and friends, and reflect on your successes and wins this past year. It was a great 2016, and 2017 only looks better!
Happy Holidays,
Stephen