China's Printing Sector Still Lacks a Standard-Setting Voice — and the Gap Is Widening

Industry standards are a cornerstone of any sector's growth, and printing is no exception. China's printing industry has expanded quickly in recent years, yet the country still has little say in shaping the standards that govern it — a gap that is holding the sector back. How did this situation take shape?

Printing standardization has been promoted inside China's printing industry for close to two decades. The trouble is that companies interpret standardization differently. Even when they invest considerable effort in building it, what they end up with is mostly a set of management and ideological rules and regulations, while the economic return delivered by standardization remains very small.

Printing companies pay too little attention to standards

Most printing companies in China today have no quality standards of their own, let alone a working standardization program, and such cases surface regularly. Not long ago, a municipal Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau ran a commodity barcode quality inspection across the city's printing firms, sampling 106 companies and drawing 134 barcode print samples. Only 22 passed, a pass rate of just 16.4%. Inspectors found that printers taking on barcode work lack awareness of the relevant laws and regulations: most were unaware that national commodity barcode standards and the state-issued Measures for the Administration of Commodity Barcodes exist, and they did not check clients' barcode certificates before printing, which allowed counterfeit and forged barcodes to reach the market. In day-to-day production, most printers chase output, turnaround time or cost, while standards and quality control come last. Companies that keep going down this road will eventually lose the market.

Printing companies misunderstand what standardization really means

Printing standardization is roughly 40 years old, while China's research into it is not yet 20 years old. Most Chinese printing companies still understand it poorly, and some have formed outright wrong ideas. A growing number treat standards as an end in themselves, assuming any standard is a good one, chasing certification after certification, and believing that once a standard is written their company instantly complies. What they overlook is that writing a standard and actually controlling a standardized process are two entirely different things. A standard that is never implemented is nothing more than a piece of paper.

Color management is a typical example. Many printers like to advertise that they follow "a certain printing standard" and that their digital proofing targets match "a certain color standard", yet in real production they rarely meet those requirements. Customers are then misled into believing they are buying fully compliant output, disputes break out between the two parties, and the result is market confusion that works against the industry's healthy development.

The overall level of printing standardization stays low

The printing industries of developed economies — the United States, Europe and Japan — are large in scale, technically advanced and highly standardized. These economies also hold a clear advantage in standardizing newer business formats such as digital printing, network printing and cross-media publishing. Emerging economies look very different: smaller scale and lower output value. The Asia-Pacific region, home to the majority of the world's population, accounts for just 25% of printing output value, and its technology is comparatively backward and its standardization level low, with standards for new business formats still at the exploratory stage.

As one of those emerging economies, China is still at an underdeveloped stage of productivity development, and problems such as poor product quality, weak management and non-compliant business behavior remain widespread. These objective conditions have sharply limited how far the country's standardization level can rise. China's economy has grown fast since the financial crisis, but its printing industry still trails developed countries in building printing standardization — and the gap keeps widening.

— Reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn); original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361839.html