2009 Printing Industry Keyword: What Industrial Revitalization Plans Signaled

Industrial revitalization plans are guiding development documents issued by the State Council to address the economic crisis, aimed at industries of strategic importance. By that time, the State Council had introduced eleven such plans, yet none was written specifically for printing. The logic is straightforward: industry professionals often cite printing's total output value to underline its significance, but objectively, printing remains a subordinate service sector, and its development had not been elevated to a national strategic priority.

That said, the lack of a printing-specific revitalization plan did not mean the sector was left out. Printing had already been folded into the national revitalization and development framework as a component of the cultural industry, while the plans for electronic information and logistics also addressed certain printing-related areas.

A First Hint of Warmth at the Year's Start

Early in 2009, China's State Council issued adjustment and revitalization plans one after another for sectors including textiles, steel, automobiles, shipbuilding, equipment manufacturing, electronic information, light industry, petrochemicals, logistics and nonferrous metals. These ten sectors are tied to the national economy and people's livelihoods; when the economic crisis struck, ensuring their sound development was an essential foundation for sustaining China's rapid and stable economic growth. In practice, these plans had already begun to connect with printing to varying degrees.

For instance, in Chapter IV, 'Policy Measures', Item 7, 'Strengthening the Building of Independent Innovation Capability' of the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Electronic Information Industry, the setting of key standards for RFID and digital rights management was placed on the same level as TD-SCDMA, terrestrial digital TV and mobile TV. RFID and digital rights management are key recent priorities for printing and a meeting point between printing and IT; these peripheral fields have become a breakthrough for some printing companies pursuing transformation strategies.

In the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Logistics Industry, meanwhile, the efficiency of publication distribution was raised to the same priority as food, salt and tobacco, and labeling technology received specific attention. The plan called for improving and promoting the article numbering system, wider use of automatic identification and marking technologies such as barcodes, smart labels and RFID, as well as EDI, while advancing visualization, cargo tracking and rapid sorting technologies and increasing investment in R&D and application of RFID and mobile logistics information service technologies and standards.

The document also encouraged active development and use of new transport technologies such as GNSS, GIS, VICS, ETC and ITS, and stronger research on logistics information system security. It further called for more R&D and production of logistics equipment, and for enterprises to adopt specialized logistics equipment for warehousing, transport, loading and unloading, sorting and packaging, and barcode printing. These measures do more than advance logistics; they resemble a fresh development opening for the printing industry.

Admittedly, neither the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Electronic Information Industry nor the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Logistics Industry was essentially designed for printing alone. Still, for a printing sector that had hit a development bottleneck, these policies offered a measure of warmth and a glimmer of dawn for what lay ahead.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362228.html