Producer
Xaar plc
UK maker of industrial piezoelectric inkjet printheads for ceramics, packaging, coding and advanced/functional printing.
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Industrial inkjet printheads
Advanced / functional printing
Printhead technology & licensing
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Concentration2024
The decorative pattern on most modern ceramic tiles is now inkjet-printed, and the printheads that do it come from a short list of specialists, Xaar among them. Industrial inkjet printheads — the precise piezoelectric devices that fire millions of tiny ink drops per second — quietly transformed tile, packaging, label and textile printing from analog screen-printing to digital, and that capability concentrates in a few firms (Xaar, Fujifilm Dimatix, Kyocera, Konica Minolta, Ricoh). So the appearance of the tiles on a floor, the print on a cereal box, and the patterns on fabric increasingly depend on a concentrated industrial-printhead supply. A component most people have never heard of reshaped several manufacturing industries within a couple of decades and now gates their digital-printing capacity — a quiet chokepoint behind the surface decoration of the built and packaged world.
Xaar plc ↗Did you know2024
The same drop-on-demand precision is moving beyond depositing ink to depositing functional fluids — printed electronics (conductive inks, displays), biological fluids in life-sciences and lab automation, and materials in 3D and additive manufacturing. So an industrial-printhead maker is positioned at the frontier where "printing" becomes a manufacturing method: precisely placing materials, not just images. Xaar's printheads, designed to decorate tiles, are the same technology being aimed at printing circuits, dispensing reagents and building objects layer by layer. The humble printhead is generalizing into a precision materials-deposition tool with applications across electronics, biotech and manufacturing — another case of a narrow industrial component whose underlying capability turns out to be broad and forward-looking, and whose supply is concentrated in a handful of firms.
Xaar plc ↗