Suzhou Packaging Printing Market Sets Sights on 100-Billion-Yuan Milestone by 2025

Suzhou’s packaging and printing sector is advancing toward a 100-billion-yuan market by 2025, backed by its position in the middle of the Yangtze River Delta printing belt and its role as a three-time host of the Printing Expo.

Building on that foundation, the city’s printing industry continues to apply five principles—innovation, coordination, green development, openness and sharing—to pursue comprehensive, high-quality growth.

Printing reaches across daily life, with industry scale among China’s leaders

China’s printing sector is now shaping an industrial economic system focused on greening, digitalization, intelligence and integration, while undergoing deep restructuring on its high-quality development path. Statistics show that by the end of 2021, Suzhou had 2,963 printing enterprises across publication printing, special publication printing, packaging and decorative printed matter printing, digital printing and other printed matter printing. The sector employed 100,200 people and generated 83.73 billion yuan in sales revenue, placing its overall scale in the top tier nationwide.

“Printing is not limited to paper products such as books; it is everywhere in daily life,” said Zhu Tianbin, technical director of Suzhou Jiangtian Packaging Color Printing Co., Ltd. He noted that beer, shampoo and body wash packaging all rely on printing. At the Printing Expo, Jiangtian displayed a body wash bottle featuring a shrink-film label produced through multiple printing processes. The label met functional testing and bottle-shrinking requirements while preserving the original design intent. The packaging printed product also won the Best Printing Award in the Combination Printing Color Halftone category at the 2020 Asian Label Awards.

Industry upgrading accelerates, with small technologies delivering big breakthroughs

Suzhou’s printing industry has long developed its own character: many companies and a large overall scale; complete technology categories and diverse products; and strong market potential with broad room for growth. Substrates such as paper, plastic, wood, silk, metal and glass are all printed in Suzhou. Over time, the city has also built advantages in labor and human resources, strong local demand for printed products, and a large number of enterprises handling printing work for other Yangtze River Delta cities. Suzhou is now actively upgrading its printing industry, developing a ‘culture + technology’ model, increasing cultural funding, gathering development factors, expanding industrial scale and advancing key cultural and creative industry projects.

A small black packaging box on the exhibition stand drew attention—what trendier language might call ‘colorful black.’ Zhou Huiming, head of Suzhou Maidian Color Printing Co., Ltd., said the small box involves significant craftsmanship. As a UV printing specialist, the company devoted considerable effort to this ‘little black box.’ “The embossed hot-stamping UV process presented quite a few challenges,” Zhou said. Because the print area was small, early production was manual, leading to inconsistent quality control and limited output. After a technical upgrade, mechanical printing now produces several thousand units per day, reducing manual labor and improving quality control.

Balancing green development and capacity, packaging printing heads toward the 100-billion-yuan scale

As daily chemical products become more homogenized, consumers are more sensitive to changes in their outer packaging, and ‘limited edition’ packs continue to appear. “These daily chemical products are updated quickly. Traditional complex technologies such as electroplating and heat transfer are not only less eco-friendly, but also costly and inefficient,” said Zhong Liang, marketing director of Suzhou Yali Printing Co., Ltd. “For example, we use lithography materials for precise registered printing, which eases the drawbacks of traditional technologies and meets the needs of green printing.”

Facing a complex and diverse environment where opportunities and challenges coexist, Suzhou is taking multiple steps: coordinating intelligent manufacturing and standardization of printed products; building intelligent logistics and warehousing to align with the ‘intelligent’ trend; promoting intensive industrial development to enhance scale and specialization; strengthening breakthrough innovation and cluster advantages among Suzhou printing enterprises; and continuing VOCs treatment to support green, healthy industry growth. By seizing opportunities and exploring new technologies, business formats and business models, Suzhou’s printing industry is accelerating high-quality development.

As Suzhou’s economy and culture continue to develop, demand for printed materials that carry culture and education keeps rising. As a major manufacturing city, Suzhou also sees growing demand for supporting products such as packaging printed matter. It is expected that by 2025, Suzhou’s packaging and printing market will reach the 100-billion-yuan scale.

—This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-379095.html