Xerox is planning to shut down Impika, the French inkjet press developer that it acquired back in 2013, despite having opened a worldwide research centre at the Aubagne site in 2014.

Xerox has tried to do this quietly without any major announcement, and has still not issued an official confirmation despite a local French newspaper, La Provence, having broken the story a couple of days ago. It appears that the decision was actually taken back in July but that under French law Xerox had to make an effort to save the jobs of the employees. Both Kyocera and EFI were said to have been interested in acquiring Impika but negotiations with both have fallen through. Consequently, the plant is set to be shut by 20 December 2019, with the loss of 141 jobs.

Impika, which is based in Aubagne in the south of France near Marseille, was set up back in 2003. Most of the core team, including managing director Paul Morgavi, had come from GemPlus, where they had developed techniques for printing to plastic for things such as credit cards and smart passes. The company showed a number of highly innovative single pass printers, such as the iPrint Extreme pictured above, that suggested that this relatively small French company could easily give some of the bigger press vendors a run for their money.

So it looked like a clever acquisition back in 2013, given that Xerox badly needed to catch up in the production inkjet space. Up until then, Xerox had concentrated its own efforts on its waterless Production Inkjet System, which didn’t sell in great numbers though it did allow journalists to take the PIS with clever headlines!

But Impika never seemed to match its early promise after being taken over by Xerox. It did produce the Rialto, a roll to sheet printer that had been shown as a concept before the Xerox acquisition. For Drupa 2016 the company introduced the sheetfed Brenva and the rollfed Trivor, and the following year announced a High Fusion inkset to allow the Trivor to print to offset papers.

More at : https://www.nessancleary.co.uk/

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