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Innovation helps Cambridge manufacturing company to flourish in shrinking market

Written by Ben Fountain

Monday, 10 December 2007

Operating in a market that common sense dictates should be experiencing a significant 'squeeze' from new technologies, Cambridge based compact disc manufacturing company, Copytrax is predicting a near three-fold increase in revenues over the next year. With the emergence of music available as downloads and films being streamed over broadband, it would seem that the future of the CD is under threat and that those in the CD and DVD duplication industry should hanging up their boots. Copytrax, however, has developed a new generation of Industrial CD and DVD printing machine. Whereas such machines used to be based on traditional screen-printing and offset techniques geared to very high volume printing, Copytrax's technology is based on advanced industrial digital inkjet technology. Turnover has already grown from £1.1m to £1.5m over the past year and the company is targeting a further £2.6m increase for 2007/2008 to £4.1m, driven by "very strong interest" in the company's new Project 37 industrial CD printing machines and also a stronger marketing effort. Copytrax expects to sell 12 Project 37 machines during 2007 and will finish the year with an order book of £500k - with another £500k of orders expecting to close during January. And crucially, demand for the technology  appears to be global with orders secured from the Middle East, Canada, the US, Germany and Spain. Copytrax's Project 37 machines are able to digitally print up to 1200 CD's per hour and the process is the same regardless of the size of the production run. "Retailers are not happy to warehouse thousands of CD's anymore," said Steve Woods, managing director of Copytrax. "Instead, they want 'just in time' delivery of smaller batches, so that they can minimise stock levels, storage costs and handling costs. This is causing a trend away from traditional silk screen techniques that need a lot of setting up and are better suited to long production runs." Along with smaller but more regular CD duplication order volumes, Copytrax has noted a demand for better quality print finishing within the DVD industry and the marketing industry. In these markets, the company says, the visual appearance of the compact disc is seen to add value to the product. Similarly, the music, film, games and software industries now tend to release a number of updated versions of a specific product. This means that companies do not wish to be holding large stocks, should they be left with outdated version on the shelf. Another factor, Copytrax says, driving the market towards, smaller but more regular production runs. In an increasingly environmentally-conscious world, there is also a green dimension to the company's technology. The approach reduces chemical waste and environmental pollution. Copytrax has been in business 15 years, starting with floppy disk technology, before being one of the first movers into CD and DVD reproduction. They are also active in the HD DVD and Blu ray markets.

 

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