Premium, Green, Digital: Charting the Next Five Years of China's Printing and Reproduction Sector

Products are the yardstick by which an industry is judged, and printing is no exception: when the output is poor, the fallout travels outward like toppling dominoes. For years, Chinese printing has been criticized on precisely this front. "Made in China" may have shaped the habits of consumers around the globe, yet it has typically delivered thin volumes at thinner margins — a case of losing money just to make a noise — with value tied to the most primitive form of manual processing and profits forever meager. The answer is to push hard on key products and build a portfolio marked by technical distinction and structural innovation, letting products shape the industry's direction and pull it up the value chain. Sticking with a premium-product strategy is what will bring China's printing industry the dawn of hope as it goes global.

The printing industry breaks down broadly into printing and reproduction on one side and printing manufacturing on the other, and each calls for a different key-product strategy. Within printing and reproduction, fine printed products and personalized printed products point the way forward, with processes required to be low-carbon, environmentally friendly and low-energy — a hard demand on enterprises to innovate technologically. Most Chinese printers are small and medium-sized, and most sit in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. Over the coming three years, as labor costs climb, backward printers will be squeezed out, and the resulting shake-up will push firms toward group structures and specialization; a premium-product strategy is certain to become the organizing principle for these companies.

Rising print quality in turn raises the bar for printing manufacturing. China will phase out outdated manual operations, with prepress platemaking and postpress finishing in particular giving way to machinery, which forces manufacturers to focus on developing new machine technologies and on building environmentally friendly, low-energy products that help printers rein in costs. Only with a solid product strategy can manufacturers claim a place in the industry market of tomorrow.

Printing is a remarkably sprawling business. It encompasses numerous sub-sectors internally and touches a great many related industries externally, making it both an enormous industrial system and a long-established one. Ever since printing was invented in ancient China, printing technology has steadily worked its way into production and everyday life, growing and developing into a major industry.

China's printing industry has already taken shape around three major industrial belts: the Pearl River Delta belt centered on Guangdong, the Yangtze River Delta belt centered on Shanghai and Jiangsu-Zhejiang, and the Bohai Rim belt centered on Beijing and Tianjin. Between January and November 2009, the sector recorded main business revenue of RMB 235,457,261,000, up 13.58% year on year, and cumulative total profit of RMB 17,300,217,000, up 19.27% over the same period a year earlier. Between January and May 2010, cumulative product sales revenue reached RMB 116,528,796,000, up 23.36% year on year, while cumulative total profit came to RMB 8,742,216,000, up 37.30%.

Through the 12th Five-Year Plan period, the growth rate of China's printing output value is to remain broadly in step with national economic development. The plan sets out to establish and improve national printing demonstration bases and to cultivate a group of competitive printing enterprises; to promote green printing with a focus on primary and secondary school textbooks, government procurement products and food and drug packaging; and to spread digital technology industry-wide, centering on digital printing, digital workflows, CTP and digital management systems. To meet those goals, eight areas of work were highlighted, among them transforming the development model, adjusting the industrial structure, and cultivating and strengthening competitive capability; building an environmental protection framework, advancing green development and steering the industry toward green transformation; and relying on scientific and technological progress to drive technological innovation and industrial transformation. Evidently, "green, innovation and digitalization" have become the defining keywords for the next five years of China's printing industry.

Innovation has long been a subject of intense interest for China's printing industry, but a late start means that innovation has so far stayed at the level of non-core technologies, which has kept the sector's development relatively slow. The 12th Five-Year Plan for printing now being drafted proposes adhering to independent innovation capability as the core, giving full play to the supporting role of the printing equipment and materials industries, and focusing on organizing the Major Project on Digital Printing and Printing Digitalization so as to form a group of printing enterprises holding independent intellectual property rights. Over the next five years, strengthening the industry's capacity for independent innovation has been elevated to a strategic level. Judging by current market conditions in China, digital printing cannot displace traditional printing in the near term, but digitalized printing is another matter: over the next five years and well beyond, digitalized printing will occupy the front of the printing stage.

Digitalized printing means recording digitalized text and image information directly onto the substrate to print. What goes in is a digital stream of text and image information, and what comes out is the same kind of digital stream. With the platemaking step removed, one major stage drops out of the workflow, satisfying environmental requirements while raising printing speed, and situations of the "book" variety no longer arise — multiple gains at once are the winning formula that makes digitalized printing central to the industry's future.

Looked at through the lens of competition among printing companies, digital printers fitted with binding equipment can cover the whole workflow from printing and postpress processing through to delivery, offering more comprehensive service with faster turnaround and lower cost than players on the market that cannot handle postpress work at all. That saving in process time and cost becomes a formidable competitive weapon.

For China to move from a big printing country to a strong printing country, green printing matters greatly, but digitalization must not be overlooked either; its vast room for growth and the green printing concept built into its workflow will be the key to the future of China's printing industry.

For a deeper look at the guiding principles behind the 12th Five-Year Plan, visit our dedicated 12th Five-Year Plan feature.

(Source: Internet, uncredited)

— Reposted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362202.html