The Bille brothers run ten print shops under one roof

In five years Billes Tryckeri in Gothenburg has developed from an offset printing company with 90 employees to a largely digital business with a turnover of 250 million and 125 employees. The major challenge in the coming years is to become profitable, says Niklas and Fredrik Bille at a seminar held in Visutech’s stand at the Sign & Print in February.

- We saw dark clouds in the sky five years ago and developed a whole new strategy which meant that we would broaden our product range, focus on IT and transform to digital printing, say the Bille brothers.

They also decided to have more sellers and to consider acquiring colleagues within the industry to grow.

Bille’s services have become enormous - "from business cards to facade banners". While this is an important part of Bille’s strategy, it is also a great challenge.

- You can say that we run ten small printing companies but under the same roof. We're not big on anything really, which means there are big challenges to become profitable, says Niklas.

The digital transformation means that printing is moved from offset to digital printing. The latter is performed by using three HP Indigo, including the 50×70 press HP Indigo 10000, which combined have a turnover of nearly 40 million in three shifts today.

But it is also about digitizing workflows, something Fredrik Bille has been responsible for, for the past few years. Today all the jobs go through the business and planning system called Poff, developed by Bille themselves.

In IT there are seven employees and 60 % of all incoming orders in the last month go through different web shops.

- We are surprised! I thought there would be much more of a resistance among customers when it came to placing orders on our services online, says Niklas.

Bille’s has a tradition of being innovative and investing in new technology and this will continue in the future. They are constantly looking for new things and one of the steps they are taking now is to invest in digital signage solutions. In the company Picler they offer brand new services for digital signage.

- We are now well equipped for the future with a high degree of digital orders so now we will focus on growth and profitability, says Niklas and Fredrik Bille.

Source: Branschkoll