#320 - Digital Direct-To-Object Printing At Production Speed: In conversation with Ken Stack, EPS

Thousands of parts per minute, each one different. That’s the new reality for direct-to-object printing, and it changes how brands think about cost, speed, and flexibility. We sit down with Ken Stack, Executive Chairman of Engineered Printing Solutions, to unpack why single pass inkjet and smart automation have pushed DTO past the tipping point and what it actually takes to run true production on real-world objects.

Ken brings three decades across industrial inkjet, M&A, and strategy, and he explains how EPS moved from pad printing heritage to leading high-speed, direct-to-object systems. We dig into the big drivers: shrinking run lengths, soaring labour costs, and the need to print on plastics, powder-coated metals, and glass with reliable adhesion. You’ll hear what separates multi pass promotional rigs from single pass production cells, why the printer is often just 20% of the total system cost, and how picking, pre-treatment, inline inspection, and sorting deliver the ROI that CFOs want. From golf balls and helmets to beverage and pharma caps, the examples are concrete, and the numbers are blunt.

We also map the global picture. North America is charging ahead on automation and reshoring, supported by accessible capital and the pressure to localise. Asia and Latin America show strong momentum, while Europe remains more cautious despite high-value short-run needs across many languages. Ken is candid about the hard parts: training vision systems to inspect 2,000 caps per minute, handling odd geometries at micron-level accuracy, and choosing heads and inks that balance gap, viscosity, and durability. The future focus is clear—make automation cheaper and easier, expand surface compatibility, and standardise core print platforms with vertical-specific handling.

If you care about packaging agility, versioned products, or cutting setup fees and downtime from your lines, this conversation lays out a practical path. Subscribe for more deep dives, share this episode with your ops team, and leave a quick review to tell us which object you want to print next.

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Transcript

Welcome And Ken’s Background

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to the Future Print Podcast, celebrating print technology and the people behind it.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the latest episode of the Future Print Podcast. Happy to have back with us today Ken Stack, who's chairman of APS Engineer Printing Systems or Solutions. Systems is right. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, my bad. Welcome back to the podcast, Ken.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Thanks for having me, Marcus. Really looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Yeah, and I'm um excited to have the chat today following your appearance at the FuturePrint Industrial Print event in Munich in January. It's only a few weeks since then. So just sort of following up on that, well, um, I'd like to sort of start by, if you if you don't mind, giving us a little bit of introduction to those that may have not have heard of one of your podcasts or talks before about who you are and also what EPS does, more importantly.

Labour Costs Driving ROI

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Absolutely. Again, Marcus, thanks for having me. Uh, Ken Stack, I've been in the industrial link chip markets for for over 30 years, started a few companies. Um, last one was a company called Jetreon that was in the digital label packaging and also actually direct to object space. Sold that to EFI back in the mid-late 2000s, uh, was on the EFI management team for a bunch of years. For the last 10 or 15 years, though, I've been running a company called Proximus that was a leading merger and acquisition, venture capital and strategy company within industrial inkjet. I've done over a billion dollars worth of inkjet deals, large ones like MS and JK, smaller ones all over the world. Uh, so that's giving me a, I think, a really interesting kind of perspective on a lot of the different industrial inkjet markets. Uh, but for the last sort of 12, 18 months, I've taken on a different challenge, which is to become the chairman of EPS in Vermont, uh in the northeast of the United States. We are a 40-year-old company that's always been focused on direct-to-object printing. It started in the pad printing business, which is actually still a large portion of the company, and then moved into digital in sort of the 2010, 2020 kind of timeframe. We are, I believe, certainly in North America, the leading provider of what we call production industrial ink-jet solutions for direct-to-object. And what I mean by production is ultra high speed, okay? Little multi-pass printers that go, you know, back and forth, sort of like smaller flatbeds. They've been around a long time in the direct-to-object space. There's there's thousands of them out there. We've sold many, many hundreds, but they produce maybe a few hundred parts per hour. Okay. When I talk about production ancient systems, I'm talking about systems that run potentially thousands of digital objects per minute. For example, we print plastic caps for pharmaceutical cap manufacturers, beverage cap manufacturers at up to 2,000 a minute. Everyone can be different. Hundreds and hundreds of lids a minute, hundreds and hundreds of saw blades, okay, golf balls, helmets, things like this. This is the, to me, one of the most interesting markets out there for industrial ink chip because the direct-to-object markets haven't undergone that analog to digital transition like many of our older industrial link chip markets, markets like wide format, textile, ceramics. They're way up the analog to digital transition curve. Direct to object, though, it's just starting that transition. And that's one of the reasons why I kind of jumped back into an operating role. I'm really excited about it. And EPS, I think, is in a great position because we've got thousands of pad printers out there. We've been doing this for a long time. We understand the applications. And so we really truly believe that direct to object is about to hit that sort of hypergrowth, okay, that a lot of these industrial other industrial inkjet markets have already undergone.

Regional Adoption: US, Asia, Europe

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, and and and for everything for anyone listening, Ken, not only is it chairman of a of a business, I suppose that's very invested in this trend, you you your background, you were one of the go-to people to ask for insight and trends and so on around industrial inkjet. Um and obviously at feature print, you probably trap back at times where we've had conversations while you were at Proximus dealing with lots of MAs, MA's, and so on and so forth, various deals. So you've seen Inkjet come to various markets, not necessarily go, but stabilize. So you've seen these revolutions before, haven't you? So this isn't this isn't a pick-up feel that you've seen in four.

Single Pass Vs Multi Pass Explained

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you know, I guess I'll say that I'm old, right? I've been through a lot of these transitions. I remember when Superwise format was in his youngest days, and and people are saying, geez, you're never going to replace analog with that. The quality's not good enough. That's probably what, by volume, 80 or 90 percent digital now? Same transitions happen with textile, right? These markets, you know, they follow kind of an S-curve. And we showed a graph about that at FuturePr, where, you know, a lot of these markets, they've all gone through this hypergrowth phase. And why? The point to when they start that transition is when the technology rises up to meet the market need. If we think about any of those markets, and I'll speak about direct object, but you can apply kind of the same logic to any of them, all of them are under pressure. Why? Well, run lines are coming down, right? This is not something I think anybody's gonna argue with. However, the the actual technology needs to be able to meet, okay, the actual market requirement. We have to be able to actually adhere to the service. We have to be able to print on things that are not flat. We have to do it at a speed that people can actually produce enough objects where they can make money. The other big force, I think, that's really hitting all of these markets, particularly direct to object, is the lack and cost of labor markets. This to me is the number one discussion we have with large customers that are thinking about transitioning, say, from uh direct offset or pad print or screen to inkjet. Today it's really hard to hire workers to go in and mix solventinks or something like that, or change plates on a press, right? There's not a lot of labor. And the cost of that labor is extraordinary, okay? Labor inflation is far outpacing general inflation. So if you look at a company that's say producing, you know, packaging or something like that, ask them what's their burden cost of a manufacturing person. Okay, it's not$10 or$20 an hour, okay? It's many times that. There's benefits and there's training and all that other stuff. So if a if a person costs$75,000,$100,000 a year to a producer, and we can eliminate four or five roles with one digital printer because we get rid of all of the changeover and all of the downtime, that is the number one factor in all of these ROI analyses. The number one, yes, the material savings are great. You don't got to play for pay, you know, plates anymore, ink waste, et cetera. Those are fine. But the number one driver is lowering the labor. Okay. And that's where direct to object and this push around automation has really come in. Okay. And so to me, this is why I'm so bullish, you know, on this market, because the technology now can meet the market need, okay, and the market's under a lot of pressure. Okay. And that labor factor, number one by far.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Yeah. So those two big forces conspiring together accelerates change. But I know obviously looking at the North American market, it's it's growing significantly, right? And adoption is your side of the pond in the North American continent is surprising even you, I believe.

Vertical Use Cases And Complexity

SPEAKER_01 7:30

It is, it is. And I think, you know, again, always two reasons, right? Whenever these markets sort of hit that curve, it's always because the the technology rose up, right, and the and the pressures on the market are pushing down. I will say that we do see, you know, geographic markets a bit differently. You know, North American market is extremely bullish right now, okay. In North America, and we're North American based, so we have a we're a little myoptic on that, I suppose. But, you know, massive capital investments going into things like data center and things like that. But the idea of automation, reshoring, all of these things are pushing people to inkjet. Okay, because you know, whether you agree with tariffs or not, right, the reaction is hey, I can't produce low-cost goods and now bring them through a tariff wall back into the United States. That's driving people to figure out how am I going to decorate them here. Okay. So there's a lot of tailwinds right now, we believe, certainly in North America. And again, add on to that the extreme cost of labor and the difficulty of even finding labor, okay, those things are helping to drive the market. Uh, I think Asia, again, is booming right now, okay, in terms of, again, direct-to-object automation. Latin America, too, I think is very bullish. I will say, my friends in Europe, you know, the mood there is a little different. I came and spoke at your Munich conference. You know, the mood there relative to capital equipment is not nearly as bullish. I think part of that is obviously your proximity to a lot of geopolitical upheaval that's going on. The other side, too, I think maybe a little cultural. You know, you're you're Europeans tend to be a little less aggressive, maybe in terms of adopting brand new capital. That said, the needs in Europe are as big or bigger than anywhere else, right? You guys have to deal with 15 plus languages all the time on your packaging or your products. There's lots of short run needs there, same number of brands there as there's in the U.S. So why? I think there's a mood difference. The market need is definitely there. But I will say, certainly in the North American markets, the DTO market right now looks extremely bullish. And again, there's not, I'm not hearing customers arguing about, hey, I don't have a capital budget. They want to understand ROI, they want to make sure it's the right move for their capital. But access to capital right now has not been a huge issue. Interest rates, again, are certainly going to be coming down, right? They've already come down a bit, you know, with our with our new Fed chairman here, they're going to be coming down further. So, you know, again, we're we're really bullish on the production side of direct to object. And these are these are very big machines, right? These are machines that cost anywhere from, say, you know, a few hundred thousand up to millions. Um, I think that that, you know, to really take advantage of the the ROI and the value proposition of digital within the direct to object markets, you need to think about automation, right? Printing, as I said to you at the conference, printing is one tiny part of the process. Okay. I've got to actually pick up an object that's usually palletized or in boxes. Okay. I generally have to space those products correctly so we can print on them. I have to pre-treat them, right? Because again, these are not labels or paper or something that was made to be printed on. These are plastics and powder-coated metals and glass. Okay. So generally, I would say 80 or 90% of our production systems have to deal with pre-treatment. I then have to print on them at full production speed. I have to inspect them at full production speed, kick out the ones that don't pass, and then I have to offload them and generally sort them. Okay, so if you think about a mass, some of these machines are 15, 30, 50, 100 feet long. Okay. The printer is only one piece. In fact, for some of our larger systems, we talked about plastic casts before, the printer is probably 20% of the cost of the system. The real cost is in the automation. But that again is where that ROI is. That automation is the thing that allows us to remove the labor. Right. And so, so that kind of discussion right now is a really exciting thing. Okay. And again, we're finding a lot of very large customers that are very excited to have that conversation.

Automation As The Real Moat

SPEAKER_00 11:31

That's brilliant to hear such confidence and optimism and excitement, frankly, and energy around the potential of the technology. And I like it is a little bit sad to hear that Europe is being a little slow to the party. I remember rewinding, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago with imprint. We were adopting back then. We were we were at the forefront. So it's interesting that that things have changed, and I'm sure to do with many of the reasons that you've mentioned there. But you're you uh you're coming up to of or to pass your uh hundredth single pass DTO protection. So uh straight straight off the bat, congratulations. That's really uh a big achievement. Um, what is the give us a bit more around the system? What is single pass production versus multi-pass right versus analog? Yeah, give give us um a little bit around that and and the different different terminology and what that means.

Future Of DTO: Printheads And Fluids

Market Timing, Team, And Scale

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yeah, no, that's great. And and first off, thank you very much. It's a big deal for us. I think hitting our hundredth single pass unit really says to the market, hey, this stuff is here to stay. This isn't new technology. You know, again, we're both we've both been around, Marcus, right? We remember when all these markets started. When these markets start, you know, usually things are um things are people are concerned that the technology is not ready. Right. In this case, after you've already sold and produced and you have a hundred out there actually printing, that discussion kind of goes away. Okay, so to me it's a it's a big marker, not just for EPS, but for the DTO market in general. You know, if you think about the different technologies, obviously things like pad print and direct offset and screen have been around forever, 50, 100 years, right? If you think about every product in your kitchen, every product in your car, it's all been pad printed as an example. Okay. It's a great technology. You use solid inks that stick to anything. The marks are extremely durable, but extremely slow, right? Sprint quality is just okay. And the changeover cost and time where that labor factor comes in is extraordinary. Okay. If you think about construction helmets, which is a really extreme example, think about a uh construction helmet where you've got the company logo on the front, the person's name on the side, and then you know, a uh a flag or something on the third side. That can literally take hours to set up on multiple pad printers, hours to then go run 20 or 30 helmets. Right? It's it's it's an amazing cost. In fact, that particular customer charges a four or five hundred dollar setup fee. Okay. With digital, that four or five hundred dollar setup fee becomes a pure profit. Okay. So the idea of the digital and the analog to digital conversion within direct to object is one of the strongest ROIs I've ever seen, okay, for digital across any of the markets you and I are used to. So the way this market began its digital journey is with multipass. Again, think about a flatbed printer, okay, that goes back and forth and back and forth, and people place objects on them, okay? That's great. And it works really well for what I'll call ultra short run promotional goods, okay? Think about phone cases and things like that. If you want to produce, you know, a hundred phone cases an hour. We sell these products, we sold three, four hundred of them, okay. They're great, okay, but it produces a few hundred an hour. Okay. Where I see markets begin to really hit that analog to digital conversion and hit that hypergrowth phase is when we can get to production volumes, okay? That's hundreds or thousands a minute, not a hundred in an hour. Because think about it, you know, think about packaging or something like that. What are you going to do with a hundred caps? Okay, that's that's not enough, right, to make any money off of. So when we think about production, it really has to be done by single pass. This is technology where the printheads stay in the same spot and we fly the objects underneath. Okay. That when you get that technology to really hit and be reliable enough for these given markets and meet the market need, that's when these things go through hypergrowth. And that's the moment we're in today. That's our hundredth single pass unit. Okay. And again, that's a combination of golf balls and saw blades and helmets and caps and bottles and all sorts of different vertical markets, but they're all printed in a single pass nature, okay? Where the printed stay stationary and the objects pass underneath. And you get that order of magnitude or two increase in speed. Okay. That's what these markets need. And that's when, if you go back, if you think about it, if you go back, think about superwide format. Superwide format began by doing what? Replacing a whole bunch of little 36-inch wide wide format printers, right? With one giant printer that was many, many times faster. Same thing with textile, right? Same thing with ceramics. All of these things went through the same kind of transition, right? When you get to production speed, that's when the volume show up. That's when the big players come in and say, hey, I'm gonna replace three or four or five offset lines with six or eight digital lines, right? Because of that cost savings in terms of labor, time, and materials.

Geopolitics And Capital Access

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting, it's really exciting. And and and and the different applications that you're talking about, because I think 10, 15 years ago, it was all about printing onto you know buckles and things like that. But now it's now it's it's it's clearly that's a strong market.

Closing And Resources

SPEAKER_01 17:03

You know, markets, it's it's it's a really important point you make there, too. If you think about the start of direct to shape or direct to object or something, um, you know, we think about the trials that went on in things like, you know, beer bottles, right? Okay, and there's a bunch of companies that kind of came and went in that space. You know, I think one of the things that that always happens in these markets is we try to do, you know, sort of the holy grail of applications, probably, which is say beer bottles or something like that. Well, beer bottles are really hard. Okay, the print quality has to be perfect. You got adhesion requirements, you have cost issues, you have crazy reliability requirements. You know, if you think about the markets I just spoke to you about, you know, there's a mix there, right? Yep, I've got some phenomenal high-end CPG level packaging markets, but I also have things like construction helmets and saw blades and golf balls. And the DTO market, one of the things that I find is a it's a great challenge and is really difficult is it's got so many verticals. Right. If I when I was back at Jetrion doing label presses, well, everybody's application was pretty similar. Okay, maybe the substrates change a little bit, but their workflow is pretty much the same. The substrates were very close. The substrates are all made to be printed on, okay. They were very controlled. Here, I have people showing up with everything from electrical connectors to crazy plastics to some crazy powder-coated metal. There's so many verticals, okay. It does make this market kind of hard. What we have found, okay, is one of the absolute key must-haves to be successful in this business is a phenomenal applications group. So we have an entire group of people that's focused on, hey, when you come to us, the first thing we do is we look at your product and we look at the surface we have to print on. Okay. What kind of pre-treatment does it need? What's the surface energy? Things like the day of the dying pen is long gone. Okay, that is not technology that can keep up with today's needs, okay? So you need to have a really good applications team that can understand, hey, you know, can we print on that surface, right? Can we get adherence? Can we get good spread and things like that? We have to figure out given the geometry, how are we gonna transport? How are we gonna move it underneath the head at micron level accuracy, right? So we can get the kind of print quality we want. It is a really different market. It's a market made up of maybe six, eight, ten different verticals. What you're gonna see from us is solutions for each vertical that use the same core in-jet technology platform. And the ancient, you know, geometries and things may change a little bit. What's really gonna change on those verticals is the automation, right? Because that's what really differentiates those different verticals. Picking up a golf ball is very different than picking up and manipulating a helmet, which is very different than moving 2,000 caps underneath a printhead every minute. Right. And so, you know, so for us, we view that applications and automation side just as important as the printer. As I always say to people, we're not a printer company. We sell manufacturing cells that decorate. Because printing is just one tiny part of that decoration process. You have to again, you gotta be able to pick it up, you have to be able to space it out, you have to be able to pre-treat it, you gotta be able to print, but then you gotta inspect and sort. Okay. And if you can't do all those things, that's tough. I think probably if I look at our hundred units, probably 70, 75% of them are full end-to-end systems. They're not just a printer. You can certainly come to us and just buy a printer, that's fine. I'll certainly sell you one, but that's not the typical solution process. The customer needs to go end-to-end. They've molded a piece of plastic, okay? They've powder coated a piece of metal, they've produced a golf ball, whatever it is. Now they need a decorated one sorted, ready for shipment at the other side. Right. And that's it. To me, this is a really great challenge, right? And it's really different than some of our other industrial ink check markets where our and product is a role.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Yeah, it's it's like you say, it's the actual thing. It's it's it's and it's exciting because it cross it's crossing lots of different markets and applications. And I also can see it providing entrepreneurs and innovators an opportunity to enter markets as well. And maybe a bit early at this stage now, but it I could see that happening. And um certainly with the entrepreneurial culture in the US. Um, what do you see as the future of DTO then? Automation, by the terms of it, is a key part of the value proposition.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yes. Automation to be is absolutely number one. As I said before, if you look at the the cost of these systems, the majority of it's the automation. It's not the print. In fact, for a lot of the, if you think about again, the the helmets and the saw blades, the printer is many times faster than the automation. It's the first market in Inkjet in 30 plus years I've ever chased were the ink just too fast.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah, that's amazing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 22:06

I mean, I've never, I mean, I've always been saying, oh, you're too slow, right? Well, and again, in some of the packaging applications, if you're competing against direct offset or something, yeah, we're still too slow. Okay. But if you think about most direct to object markets, okay, no, the inkjet's way too fast. That's not the problem. The investment needs to become how do I make the automation lower cost and easier? I'll give you a great example. If you're trying to inspect 2,000 bottle caps in a minute, it's actually really hard, right? I've got to go in, I've got to train the inspection algorithm, okay? It's it's not easy. So there's two things there. There's a cost issue, and then there's an ease of use issue with the automation. When I say ease of use, what I mean is the training, right? You've got robots that have to pick up lots of different objects and things like that. That to me is where the innovation has to come from. The inkjets, look, we will ride the inkjet innovation curve. I, you know, one of the great things about EPS is we're actually, even though we're owned by Czar, we're printhead agnostic. We use many different kinds of printheads depending on the application. We're going to ride that printhead inform uh performance improvement. Okay. And printheads have been a huge part of making us more successful as the gap, right, as the nozzle velocity is increased and we can print across a longer gap. That helps us a lot on different geometries. We're able to use far more a far more larger portfolio of inks nowadays with things like high viscosity, okay? All of those things have helped us. And we're going to continue to ride, okay, that um that technology curve from prints and inks and things of that nature. But what's really going to expand our total available market, okay, is two things. It's that automation, okay, making it cheaper, easier, faster, and it's the ability to print on different surfaces. Okay. So again, continuing to extend that print gap and continuing to be able to use more aggressive fluids, okay, that can hear to things like powder-coated metals, right, and things of that nature. So as I think about the future of DTO, it's really automation number one, okay, and continuing to ride those curves of general ancient automation uh innovation around printheads, okay, and around fluids. And to me, this is gonna continue. That said though, Marcus, today, I gotta tell you, the vast majority of people that come to us, we can do their application with today's technology. It's really then just a question of, hey, does the ROI fit or not? Right? Is you know, a half a million to a million dollar purchase, is it worth it for them to get off of whatever analog solution they are? And, you know, we're gonna continue to expand the market, but today there's there's more than enough market for us to go after.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Yeah, it's exciting. So it's fine-tuning on the technological side, more on the ink-j-head side, and then the the automation which is already existing provides a really compelling case economically that once you've got the once you've got the variability of the economies of scale and the technical attributes aligned, like you say, there's market pull as well, isn't it? It's uh consumer pull. All of these.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

That's why it's all coming together at once. And that's why again, that's why I got into this again, right? I mean, I was very happy with MA and advising you back in the game, yeah, because it it's very rare where you see such a clear, delineated line where, hey, I think this market's gonna take off. Okay. And as a as a venture capitalist, right, who sits on venture capital panels, what do we look for? We look for large markets, right? Well, direct to object is an extremely large market, right? Everything in your house, everything in your car, everything you have has been has been printed. Okay. Is the technology, is there a big problem to solve? Yeah, there is, right? Shorter run lines, labor, materials costs, those are all there. There's a clear ROI. Is the technology ready? It's absolutely ready, right? I'm telling you right now, again, we just we just again sold our hundredth unit, right? I think that's no one's gonna argue with us anymore. Is it direct to object at production speeds? Is it real? It's absolutely real. The last part, there's four pieces to that question, is do you have the right team? Okay, EPS has been doing this for 40 years. We grew up in the pad print market. Okay, we've got 40 years under a belt of dealing with people that send us these crazy shaped objects with weird coatings. How do you start? And that's why, that's again, that's why I've jumped back in, and that's why I'm so bullish on this market.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Yeah, it's exciting to hear. I really like that sort of confidence, that sort of um energy optimism and and and excitement, frankly speaking. Good. Thanks so much for all of that. And I'm gonna put your LinkedIn profile and website in the notes and everything else. Just before we finish, just zooming way out now, zooming way out, and he kind of touched on it a bit with the different kind of behavior sets or culture sets between America and Europe at the moment. Geopolitics is is kind of in the front headlines and big headlines and big lights at the moment, which is um causing everybody a level of anxiety, I imagine, uh, over what's gonna happen next. Well, what is how do you see this impact in the market, whether whether Europe, America, whatever, how do you see it panning out?

SPEAKER_01 27:13

You know, it's a it's a great question and obviously a hard one to answer. I think, again, I'm gonna answer it again by region, okay? Because I do think the answer from my view, and I do, you know, we've we're trying to sell stuff into Europe, we have units there, uh, Asia as well, and obviously our main market in North America. North America, again, you know, obviously the geopolitical upheaval that's out there today is is probably the biggest I've seen in probably in my career. That said, it's not affecting business optimism here, as far as I can tell. Okay. I'm having when I talk to a customer every day, no one's saying, oh, well, given some of the issues we're cutting back or we're nervous. It's quite the opposite. I think the the boom in capital spend around AI alone is dragging along so much other spend that that I think from my perspective in North America, we're gonna be in great shape. Okay. Deregulation, some of the other tailwinds that we have, I think we're in great shape. I think Asia and Latin America, you know, I think they're far less affected by some of this geopolitical upheaval than Europe. Europe to me is the outlier. Okay. Europe to me is the one that I think, you know, again, very close to where these things are happening. Okay, so the geopolitical upheaval, I'm sure, hits home a lot more than it does for the rest of us. And again, I think culturally, to be honest, uh, Europe has tended to be a little more uh, you know, risk-averse over time, which is interesting to me because Europe, again, has always been this cradle of industrial link jet innovation, right? Because you've had the many languages, you've had this issue of short-run SKUs, probably worse than the rest of us just by the language issues. Okay. But as I talk to both my colleagues over there, as I talk to competitors over there, I talk to customers over there, people are feeling, you know, pretty risk averse right now, particularly in the area of capital spend. And I think, you know, the other area there too, I think in Europe that's a bit different than the US is in the US, there's a lot of financing still available for capital equipment. In Europe, that does feel like it's shrinking quite a bit, right? So the access to capital in Europe, particularly for those small to medium-sized customers that need to finance those large capital purchases, I don't think it's as ready available, readily available as it is here, or in Asia for that matter. So I think that's a that's another factor to kind of layer on there. And you can call that geopolitical as well. So so, you know, again, I'm super bullish on North America. I'm very bullish on Asian and Latin America. Europe, I hope that the optimism level starts to increase a bit. I, you know, like I said, when I was at your future print conference, that was one of the things that did surprise me. I spend most of my time in the North American market. It is far more bullish than my colleagues were at the conference over there.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Yeah, interesting. And probably become more stark over the last few years. Um frustrating element is that all of the attributes of the technology of DTO and EPS you were talking about play well to this disruption and this uh this this um around this kind of need to be agile and responsive and so on. So I imagine um that it will start to change over time. Alison, thanks so much for joining us today, Ken. Really interesting conversation as usual and really helpful. Congratulations again on the hundredth single parts DTO production system being sold, and uh, we look forward to having you back in the future.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Marcus, as always, thanks. Really enjoy the conversation. I look forward to seeing you in the next conversation. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 30:42

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