EFI chief executive Guy Gecht has hailed the quality of visitors attending drupa in just the first few days of the show.

"We already have more leads than we did in the entire drupa four years ago," he said. "I have met visitors from China, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia… from all over the world. The beauty of drupa is the international element and so far it’s been fantastic."

Gecht said EFI was benefiting from the huge growth potential in inkjet, with ink volumes up 41% at the company. Within that, Jetrion ink sales are up 93% year-on-year. "Our customers are really utilising our technology to grow. The first report I open every morning is ink consumption, it’s an important indicator."

Alongside a raft of new launches, EFI is showing a gallery of inkjet printed ceramic tiles on its booth (Hall 5, stand C01) printed using technology from recent acquisition Cretaprint. "I envisage in a few years that people will use something like Digital Storefront to design their own tiles when they’re remodeling their kitchen or bathroom."

Gecht said drupa 2012 was "another inkjet drupa" because of inkjet’s versatility in printing onto so many substrates, at speed. Despite the rash of announcements from other vendors moving into latex ink technology, Gecht said EFI currently had no plans to do likewise. "We are in production printing and latex is not a technology our customers really need or use. It won’t stick to the materials they need to print onto. UV LED has so much room to grow, at this point we’re going to stick with that."