EFI leaving Meredith for new Londonderry facility

By MICHAEL KITCH, LACONIA DAILY SUN

MEREDITH — Electronics for Imaging, Inc. — best known as EFI — headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, which designs and manufactures digital imaging printers and inks, along with the software to manage printing projects, announced yesterday that it will move its Inkjet operations from Meredith to a newly constructed facility in Londonderry in 2018.

The company employs 837 people, 350 of them in Meredith, where digital printers are manufactured, of whom about a third are engineers.

In a prepared statement Scott Schinlever, senior vice president and general manager of EFI’s Inkjet business, said, “While we are extremely grateful to have been part of the very welcoming business community in Meredith, relocating to the Manchester area comes with some key advantages to help us continue growing, including proximity to the tremendous pool of talent in the greater Boston metropolitan region.”

A 250,000-square-foot facility, 25 percent larger than the space in Meredith and less than a mile from the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, is scheduled to be completed in early 2018. The building will house research and development, manufacturing, warehousing, training and servicing for the company’s wide format printers as well as global sales and marketing management for EFI’s more expansive portfolio of industrial printers and presses. A customer briefing and demonstration center will also be part of the new facility. In addition, the site includes space for expansion.

EFI has entered a long-term agreement with the city of Manchester and will lease the building from BTMU Capital Leasing & Finance, LLC of Boston, a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the second largest bank holding company in the world.

A year ago Schinlever said that recruiting employees with the appropriate aptitude and skills, particularly engineers, is “always a struggle.” He noted that EFI finds itself competing with other advanced manufacturers in the state and Lakes Region for a relatively small and rapidly aging workforce. Rumors that the company intended to leave Meredith have been rife in the Lakes Region for some time.

EFI reported revenues of $447.7 million in 2015 and has recorded average annual growth of more than 15 percent for the past five years. The EFI Inkjet business represents more than half of total sales.