Lu Lizhe: How Printing Should Face the Mobile Communication Era

Editor's note: The mobile communication era calls for convenient and pleasant services, and it makes "benefits" easier to share than in the internet era. The acquisition of technology today is beyond imagination; all technology suppliers hope that whoever it is will use their technology, and cloud computing has made network applications unbelievably cheap.

Today, many printing plants find business difficult, mainly for the following reasons: prices are rock bottom; oversupply (the number of printing presses exceeds market demand) - one extra press in a region will affect printing prices; any printing press can produce similar quality; digitalization; product differentiation disappears; only "price" is left, and when "price" becomes the feature, it becomes the "red ocean" of a buyer's market.

Buffett once said that "the benefits of digitalization can never be reflected in financial statements". Is it really digitalization that has created the current state of the printing industry - that business is difficult? Digitalization may change production efficiency and solve inefficient production methods; it may change service efficiency and produce new business models. Would everything be fine if everyone just gave up digitalization? Even so, production efficiency would not change, and only a small number of "early birds" could enjoy the financial benefits. When latecomers appear, the "early birds" can only cede the advantages to their customers.

Successful printing business models all take orders online to do printing business; they can all take orders online to do printing business; they all use the network to serve printing customers. They can all do small-volume, high-variety printing business; they can also handle large-volume order printing business. Most of their customers are end customers; most of their customers' business is brought in by salespeople. What they provide is a printing service, which with restrictions added becomes a product. Only with a business model can you set your own "low price". The network extends your reach, orders increase, and headcount does not increase; business management becomes efficient, scale grows, product lines increase, and the process stays unchanged.

To start a successful business model, first discover the inefficiencies, then solve them with appropriate digital technology - design the business model. Do not provide services that cannot be charged for; anything a computer can do must not be done by hand; use the digital technology appropriate at the time; limit specifications so that production can be automated; lower prices to compensate for the inconvenience caused by the restrictions; create scale to reduce overall costs.

New demand does not mean getting people who do not need printing to print, nor is it merely "going online to find customers", and it is certainly not as simple as buying the software systems of Jianhao or Baonuoshi. A new business model is not built in a day, and already successful online printing cannot be imitated. Any new model should take the "overall environment" into consideration.

Now the internet era has become the past, and we have entered the mobile communication era. The mobile communication era calls for convenient and pleasant services, and it makes "benefits" easier to share than in the internet era.

The acquisition of technology today is beyond imagination; all technology suppliers hope that whoever it is will use their technology, and cloud computing has made network applications unbelievably cheap. The technologies now needed in printing include: cloud applications for printing portals, photo albums, and e-books; business management can be digitalized; errors can be digitalized to achieve automatic proofreading.

At present, the domestic printing industry is undergoing change, with the following development trends:

1. Total output value is still rising slightly;
2. Business is increasingly concentrated; in Zhejiang last year, 70% of output value was concentrated in 30% of printing plants;
3. Even large printing groups have come out to compete for printing jobs;
4. Many printing plants are still expanding capacity;
5. Within 5-10 years, the number of printing plants is expected to decrease by 30-40%.

According to data from the Printing Industries of America, the number of printing plants in the United States fell by 32% between 1999 and 2009, and the number of printing industry employees fell by 41%.

What the printing industry now faces is that whatever can be digitalized will certainly be digitalized, and transformation must use digital technologies that fit the overall environment. Therefore, whatever can be digitalized must be digitalized one step earlier than others, inefficient models must be identified, and digitalization must be used to change the printing business model.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361790.html