Decoding the 12th Five-Year Plan: Where Printing and Reproduction Are Headed in the Next Five Years

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As a sector of industry, printing's products are the scoreboard by which the industry is judged. If printing products are not made well, the knock-on effects spread like falling dominoes. For China's printing industry, products have always been the object of criticism: although "Made in China" has shaped the habits of people the world over, our goods are typically sold at razor-thin margins and low volumes, a case of losing money just to make a noise, embodying value in the most primitive form of labor. What we turn out is simple manual processing, and we forever earn meager profits. We should therefore vigorously develop key products and build a range of products with technical distinction and structural innovation, letting products shape the industry's development and drive its upgrading. Upholding a premium-product strategy for the printing industry is the dawn of hope for China's printing industry to "go global" and move toward victory.

The printing industry can be broadly divided into the printing and reproduction sector and the printing manufacturing sector, and different sectors naturally require different key-product strategies. For printing and reproduction, fine printed products and personalized printed products will be the direction of future development, with printing processes required to be low-carbon, environmentally friendly and low-energy. This demands technological innovation from printing and reproduction enterprises. Most Chinese printing enterprises are small and medium-sized, and most are located in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. Over the next three years, as labor costs rise, some backward printing enterprises will be eliminated, and industry consolidation will gradually give rise to group-based, specialized printing enterprises; in the future, these enterprises are certain to organize themselves around a premium-product strategy.

As the quality of printed products rises, higher product requirements are placed on printing manufacturing. In the future, China will eliminate backward manual operations; prepress platemaking and postpress finishing in particular will be replaced by machinery, forcing manufacturers to focus their attention on developing new machine technologies and creating environmentally friendly, low-energy products so as to reduce printing enterprises' costs. Only by developing a sound product strategy can manufacturers secure a place in the industry market of the future.

Printing is a fairly complex industry. Not only does it contain many sub-sectors internally, it also involves a great many related industries; it can be said to be an enormous industrial system, and one with a long history. Since the invention of printing in ancient China, printing technology has steadily penetrated production and daily life, and has steadily grown and developed into a major industry.

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

During the 12th Five-Year Plan period, the growth rate of China's printing industry's total output value basically kept pace with national economic development. The plan called for establishing and improving national printing demonstration bases and cultivating a number of competitive printing enterprises; focusing on primary and secondary school textbooks, government procurement products and food and drug packaging to vigorously promote green printing; and focusing on digital printing, digital workflows, CTP and digital management systems to extend digital technology across the entire industry. The goals set out eight areas of work, including transforming the development model, adjusting the industrial structure, and cultivating and enhancing competitive strength; building an environmental protection system, promoting green development and guiding the industry's green transformation; and relying on scientific and technological progress, advancing technological innovation and guiding industrial transformation. Clearly, "green, innovation and digitalization" have become the keywords for the next five years of China's printing industry.

Innovation has long been a topic of great concern in China's printing industry, but because of its late start, innovation in the industry has so far remained at the level of non-core technologies, which has kept the industry's development relatively slow. The 12th Five-Year Plan for the printing industry currently being drafted proposes that we "should adhere to improving independent innovation capability as the core, give full play to the supporting role of the printing equipment and materials industries, and focus on organizing the Major Project on Digital Printing and Printing Digitalization so as to form a group of printing enterprises with independent intellectual property rights." Over the next five years, enhancing the industry's independent innovation capability has been elevated to a strategic level. Obviously, judging from the current state of the domestic printing industry, digital printing cannot replace traditional printing in the short term, but digitalized printing is a different matter: over the next five years and even further into the future, digitalized printing will stand at the forefront of the printing stage.

Digitalized printing means recording digitalized text and image information directly onto the substrate for printing. What goes in is a digital stream of text and image information, and what comes out is also a digital stream of text and image information. With the platemaking process removed, one major step is eliminated from the printing workflow, which not only meets environmental requirements but also boosts printing speed, and the kind of situation associated with "books" will no longer arise — achieving multiple benefits at once is the winning formula that makes digitalized printing key to the industry's development.

From the perspective of competition among printing companies, compared with some companies on the market that cannot perform postpress processing, digital printing companies equipped with binding equipment can provide more comprehensive services across the entire workflow, from printing and postpress processing to delivery, with faster delivery times and lower costs. In this way, the savings in overall process time and cost become a very powerful competitive weapon.

To transform from a big printing country into a strong printing country, green printing is very important, but digitalization must not be neglected either; its vast room for development and the green printing concept embedded in its workflow will be key to the future development of China's printing industry.

Click to enter the 12th Five-Year Plan special feature: an in-depth look at the guiding principles of the 12th Five-Year Plan

(Source: Unknown, Internet)

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