Anygraaf Oy’s North American subsidiary, Anygraaf USA Inc., is hard at work on expanding the company’s presence here in the United States.

“We are still very much in start-up mode, pursuing various prospects,” explained Andy Hunn, president of Anygraaf USA. “ We’re hoping the market picks up for 2003 and that newspapers will be in more of a ‘buy’ mode.”

The North American subsidiary of the Finnish software company is hoping to build a customer base on the products that are known to over 100 European customers — the company’s solutions for ad management, workflow control, image management, pagination, imposition, ad tracking, Internet publishing, edition management, ad layout and asset management.

“We are in the process of expanding our presence in the United States through partners, bringing our marketing up to speed and bringing our office up to speed,” Hunn said. “That was our goal for the first year — to get our feet planted and our presence established, so that we can be in a better position to start pursuing customers.”

While the company only has one customer at the moment, momentum is building and Hunn believes that when spending money becomes available at newspapers, his company will be in a position to provide them with whatever they might be looking for.

“We’re not disappointed where we stand right now,” Hunn said. “If we weren’t getting demonstrations and weren’t being asked for information, we would be.”

Despite that fact, Hunn also believes that customers are now taking different approaches to their methods of searching for products.

“They’re looking in other ways, using the Internet, as well as a variety of other ways,” he said. “I think it’s [due to] a variety of conditions — if people aren’t buying they aren’t looking. Some are [looking] — they always do. We’ve experienced that — we can just see from traffic at places like America East and even Nexpo that fewer people are going to trade shows and so forth. They’re not looking in those traditional ways anymore.”

With demonstrations taking place and the company experiencing interest from potential customers, Anygraaf USA stands poised to take advantage of positive economic conditions.

“We want to introduce this product in the United States,” Hunn said. “We think that it can do very well here.”