CAP Ventures Inc., a strategic consulting and market research firm for the business and visual communications industry, today announced the release of a new multi-client study titled, "The New Corporate Print Customer: A Profile of a Market in Transition." The study takes a comprehensive look at the changing corporate print industry and provides a detailed snapshot of the marketplace.

CAP Ventures' research includes 393 interviews with document owners and 556 interviews with print buyers. This is the first study of its kind that clearly differentiates between these two groups of print customers. The interviews provide answers to questions concerning topics such as spending patterns, who specifies and purchases print, the impact of technology, and use of document outsourcing services.

Key insights from the study include:

• 
  On average, corporations spend approximately 3% of their total revenue on print with outside vendors.
• Overall, document owners and print buyers expect print volume to grow, though only slightly. Print buyers expect print volume to grow 2.9% overall, while document owners expect print volume to grow 2.3% overall.
• Almost two-thirds of respondents are making information available electronically, and they expect this adoption to grow significantly during the next year.
• Approximately one third of document owners currently use variable information printing.
• These respondents are somewhat optimistic about increasing the use of variable information technologies in the future.
• Despite the widespread use of POD technology, document obsolescence still an issue. On average, 12.6% of print becomes obsolete before it can be used.
• The print procurement function is generally distributed throughout multiple departments in an organization.
• Over half of all respondents indicated that their companies had no mandated process for specifying and purchasing print.

Respondents cited printing and delivery costs and document accuracy as their most significant problems.
Less than 20% of all respondents' organizations have deployed a corporate-wide e-procurement solution. Of these respondents, approximately 85% use these solutions for procurement of print and/or paper, and only 14% of print buyers' organizations have implemented an e-procurement solution specifically for the purchase of print or paper. Nevertheless, respondents state that about 20% of print spending is being conducted via the Internet, and this percentage is expected to grow to 30% over next two years. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 18%.

"These results are significantly larger than we forecast in CAP Ventures 2000 study entitled Print e-Procurement: Changing the Face of the Printing Industry," notes Holly Muscolino, Director of CAP Ventures' Production Workflow Solutions service. "This supports the notion that despite the end of the dot-com boom, the Internet is an important enabling technology, and adoption by print buyers has continued to grow rapidly."

The research also includes in-depth, one-on-one interviews with end-users to understand customer motivations, requirements, and expectations for purchasing print, as well as interviews with service providers to discuss strategic plans to obtain and retain print customers in a changing marketplace. The complete study is available for purchase.