At the annual meeting for Federation of Norwegian Printers, we got the chance to meet with Senior Management Consultant Michael Bach Nielsen from Medit Consult. He is one of the leading consultants in the Scandinavian print market and has a great insight in both label print – as well as management in general. No doubt that many printers these days are looking for alternatives in their offerings and though label seems to be a consistent and profitable business area, Michael Bach Nielsen warns about the challenges that have​ to be considered before entering the market space.

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It’s interesting because it’s driven by some other factors. So the main factors, it’s because so you see consumption increase in labor, because you see more people, more different products. And there’s another term.

So we have growth in volume. Probably also have it then it’s followed up by production budgets. So we have a smaller cost of the total cost is the labor costs. And so it’s not so price focused that normal printed mail is like the heat set stuff and stuff like that, yeah?

Yeah, but it’s also important to mention that it’s quite difficult to print labels than normal printed mailer. So you have to take into consideration what kind of customer products that we have already. Is it possible to get into the marketplace? To have the money to invest in new machinery and new capacity towards the guys who works there and stuff like that. But it could be a quite interesting area for a lot of companies, I think.

Yeah I think it would be much easier. You can say not so complicated to get in. But of course you have to take it into consideration what kinds of customer products and so on do we have for following your strategy.

Exactly yes. So it could easily take one half year to one year to get into the marketplace. So we have to take that into consideration of the timeframe.

So the biggest concern has to be to take into consideration which kind of regulations we have to fulfill. Which kinds of customers and which kind of internal competencies and stuff like that. That’s the most important thing. It’s not so important. You can buy the equipment, and it is possible to make a good product and equipment. Of course you have to have the right competences too, but it is most important to make sure that you can do it.

It’s quite a big and important strategic move, and you have to take extremely much into this consideration, which kind of customers do you already have? Is it possible to sell more labels to the existing customers? Is it possible to get in contact with new customers? Do we have the time to wait because it will take one half year, maybe one year? But if you have a solid base, it could be a wise decision for companies.

I think the most reasonable way to go is to start up by yourself. But you can maybe make some collaboration with your customers, your existing customers and so on. But you have to start by yourself. I think it’s quite difficult to see you can partner with other different labels companies.

So if you can go into the web, of course, then you can find our webpages, midiconsult.dk. And we are offering services towards business development, M&A, leadership development strategy. And we also are making into more technical stuff like [inaudible 00:03:22] management, color management and workflow management, automization and so on. But niche towards the media companies and media problems.