Technical Analysis of the Development of the Printing and Packaging Industry Under a Complex and Volatile International Situation

Since the 14th Five-Year Plan, the complex and volatile international and domestic situation has had a considerable impact on the national economy and people's livelihood, and its impact on the printing industry has been even greater and far-reaching.

I. Impact of the Macro Environment on Industry Development

1. Social Level

From 2020 to 2022, the pandemic has lasted into its third year. With the pandemic continuing and rebounding domestically and raging abroad, packaging and printing enterprises have also been hit hard.

In the first half of 2022, the main difficulties included a decline in orders for printed products, poor circulation of printing raw and auxiliary materials, difficulty for enterprises in operating at full capacity, and inability to deliver products on time. These unfavorable factors disrupted the normal operating order of enterprises and caused periodic production stagnation.

Export equipment faced the risk of being difficult to install, commission, and operate normally, further impacting the development of the packaging industry.

The implementation of domestic environmental protection policies and industry access policies will continue to drive capacity integration and layout adjustment among packaging and printing enterprises, promoting the industry's development toward scale and specialization. As industrial concentration continues to rise, industry resources will become concentrated in advantageous large enterprises with higher production efficiency and lower costs.

1. Economic Level

The China-US trade war and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have led to price increases for some raw materials. Correspondingly, costs for printing and packaging enterprises have risen, and enterprises have seen revenue growth without profit growth. Therefore, regarding their next steps in planning and development, many enterprises are tightly holding onto their purse strings and taking a wait-and-see attitude.

The chip shortage brought about by international trade conflicts has also greatly affected the development of various industries. Chip-based industrial control products, including human-machine interfaces, PLCs, drives, sensors… and so on, remain in continuous tight supply with no trend of improvement, affecting machine commissioning and delivery.

II. Impact of the Macro Environment on Technology Research and Development

This is the issue we are most concerned about at present, mainly reflected in three aspects:

1. Bottleneck Problems

The most central issue is the industrial control system. Whether for publishing or packaging equipment, the mainstream systems are uniformly foreign brands; foreign brands such as Siemens, Rockwell, ABB, Schneider, Rexroth, Beckhoff, Baumüller, Yaskawa, and Mitsubishi account for an absolute majority. Domestic industrial control systems have only scattered applications in a few small and micro enterprises, and their application among mainstream equipment manufacturers is almost negligible.

As far as domestic industrial control systems are concerned, servo motor products are already mature and have begun batch application, while drives are much weaker, with obvious shortcomings in precision control and high-speed control. PLCs, the core of the core, are even more fragile: most domestic industrial control systems do not have their own PLCs, and even manufacturers with their own PLCs cannot meet performance requirements.

Even if domestic manufacturers now have high-performance drives and PLCs, the chips used in them depend on imports. In the short term, mainstream domestic industrial control manufacturers mainly rely on existing inventory, which generally lasts less than two years; the prospects for subsequent development are unclear and depend mainly on when the tight international chip supply situation eases.

Many printing and packaging equipment enterprises are in fact already waiting for supplies before they can proceed; supply lead times of 8 months or even more than 1 year constrain them, and the industry development dilemma caused by the shortage of industrial control systems for equipment cannot be improved.

1. Innovative Technologies

The automation, digitization, and intelligentization of printing and packaging equipment are relatively widespread abroad, but in China, apart from a few enterprises that have introduced advanced foreign printing and packaging equipment, commercial automated printing presses are almost nonexistent. First, automation devices need to be applied, including:

①Fully automatic roll loading and unloading;

②Automatic tape application;

③Automatic replacement system for impression rubber rollers;

④Automatic cleaning and replacement system for plate cylinders;

⑤Full-width lateral temperature-controlled color register system;

⑥Drying system with on-demand adjustment of air volume and dampers;

⑦Automatic tension adaptation system required when lamination equipment laminates different materials;

⑧Semi-flexible coating system required for soft and hard aluminum coating and film coating.

Second is informatization. At present, each printing and packaging equipment enterprise uses industrial control systems from different manufacturers, with a wide variety of communication protocols, and the timely transmission of production information from each machine has become a problem; communication between machines also cannot be effectively realized.

Factory informatization lacks overall coordination and supports enterprise operations in a fragmented and unbalanced manner, resulting in duplicated and inconsistent data and the creation of data silos. This situation will inevitably require future data cleansing, bringing enormous potential costs to subsequent digitization and intelligentization and becoming a stumbling block to future intelligent development.

Third, supply information, customer information, process information, and production information need to be fully digitized. They need to break away from the IT framework, with digital models and tools forming a comprehensive network, linking all internal and external links of the enterprise through uninterrupted data; information systems and automation equipment must be integrated so that the generated data can deliver application value.

As for smart factories, we will have to wait: these production equipment and enterprise management systems do not yet have self-learning capabilities.

1. Environmental Protection Technologies

Green and energy-saving is an eternal topic for the printing industry. Environmental protection measures vary widely, but they boil down to source treatment and end-of-pipe treatment.

(1) Source Treatment

For organic solvent-based inks, recovery and reuse technology for a single type is fully mature, but the high investment in recovery equipment discourages most printing enterprises.

Water-based inks for plastic gravure printing are still in difficult trial stages; they currently require the addition of considerable alcohol components before use, and issues such as scratch resistance, lamination bond strength, and color saturation remain to be solved, so there is still a long way to go. However, in paper packaging, more than 30% of gravure water-based inks can currently be applied.

Decorative paper is a separately developed category, where almost 100% water-based inks are currently in mature application. It is a green-development industry with no treatment issue, but relatively high energy consumption is also a major concern for enterprises.

Water-based flexographic printing on plastic is similar to paper gravure printing, but with better lamination bond strength; it can be fully promoted for printed products that do not require high color saturation and in provinces that do not mind alcohol emissions.

UV inks, with 100% solid content, are compatible with various printing materials, but are mainly used on offset presses; due to the hygiene issues of photoinitiators, they can only be applied to non-food and non-pharmaceutical packaging materials.

EB inks, with 100% solid content, are compatible with various printing materials and contain no photoinitiators. They can be applied on satellite flexographic presses (with less satisfactory pattern clarity) and satellite offset presses, but the localization of low-energy EB curing machines is still being explored; foreign models are not only expensive (over 5 million) but may also face chokepoint restrictions.

(2) End-of-pipe Treatment

For organic mixed solvents, RTO incinerators are used, but the purchase of carbon quotas awaits you in the near future.

In today's world, no industry can become an isolated island, and all are inevitably affected by changes in the macro environment. For the printing and packaging equipment industry, carbon reduction, core technologies, and localization of products are the directions we strive toward.