Suzhou Packaging and Printing Market to Hit 100-Billion-Yuan Scale in 2025

Suzhou's packaging and printing market will reach the 100-billion-yuan scale by 2025

As the host city of three editions of the Printing Expo, Suzhou, located in the middle of the Yangtze River Delta printing industry belt, has unique locational advantages. On this basis, Suzhou's printing industry persists in implementing the five concepts of innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing, and drives the industry's comprehensive high-quality development.

Printing is everywhere; the industry scale ranks among the top in the country

At present, China's printing industry has gradually formed an industrial economic system whose main content is "greening, digitalization, intelligence and integration", and as it advances toward high-quality development, the printing industry is also facing profound reshaping. According to statistics, by the end of 2021, Suzhou had a total of 2,963 printing enterprises of various types, covering publication printing, special publication printing, packaging and decorative printed matter printing, digital printing and other printed matter printing and other categories, with a total of 100,200 employees and sales revenue of 83.73 billion yuan, with the overall scale at the top tier nationally.

"In fact, printing is not just the paper products such as books that everyone thinks of; it is everywhere in our lives." Zhu Tianbin, technical director of Suzhou Jiangtian Packaging Color Printing Co., Ltd., told reporters, "The beer we drink, the shampoo and body wash we use — the packaging of all these are our printed products." At the Printing Expo site, Jiangtian brought a bottle of body wash whose bottle body uses a shrink-film label printed through multiple processes, so that the label can both meet the requirements of functional testing and shrink-fitting to the bottle while retaining the label's original design intent. "This packaging printed product also won the Best Printing Award in the Combination Printing Color Halftone category at the 2020 Asian Label Awards."

Printing industry transformation and upgrading; small technology, big breakthroughs

For a long time, the development of Suzhou's printing industry has had its own characteristics, featuring "many enterprises and large overall scale", "complete technology categories and many product varieties" and "great market potential and broad development space"; the printing of substrates such as paper, plastic, wood, silk, metal and glass is all represented in Suzhou. At the same time, in the course of development, Suzhou's printing industry has gradually formed the advantages of abundant labor and human resources, strong local demand for printed products, and many enterprises undertaking printing business from other cities in the Yangtze River Delta. At present, Suzhou is actively promoting the transformation and upgrading of the printing industry, vigorously developing the new business format of "culture + technology", continuously increasing investment in cultural funds, gathering development factors, expanding the industry scale, and promoting the construction of a number of key cultural and creative industry projects.

A small black packaging box on the exhibition stand caught the reporter's attention; to describe it with a trendy phrase: a colorful black. Zhou Huiming, head of Suzhou Maidian Color Printing Co., Ltd., introduced that the small packaging box has great craftsmanship inside. Specializing in UV printing, they put a lot of thought into this "little black box". "As the saying goes, only an expert sees the craft; this embossed hot-stamping UV process really gave us quite a few problems." Zhou Huiming said that because the printing area is small, manual production was used at first, and quality control was unstable and output could not rise; "after technological upgrading and the use of mechanical printing, several thousand pieces are produced a day, which not only 'liberated' our hands but also improved quality control."

Grasp both green and capacity; packaging and printing will reach the 100-billion-yuan scale

As daily chemical products become increasingly homogenized, consumers have become more sensitive to changes in these products' outer packaging, and various "limited edition" packagings keep emerging. "These daily chemical products are updated quickly; if traditional complex technologies such as electroplating and heat transfer are used, it is not only not eco-friendly but also costly and inefficient." Zhong Liang, marketing director of Suzhou Yali Printing Co., Ltd., also has deep feelings about this: "For example, we use lithography materials for precise registered printing, which not only alleviates the drawbacks of traditional technologies but also meets the development needs of green printing."

Suzhou's printing industry is facing a complex and diverse environment in which opportunities and challenges coexist; to this end, Suzhou is advancing on many fronts, such as jointly promoting intelligent manufacturing and the standardization of printed products; promoting the construction of intelligent logistics and warehousing to cater to the mainstream of "intelligent" development; developing the industry intensively to promote its scale and specialization; increasing breakthrough innovation by Suzhou printing enterprises and building cluster advantages; and continuously pushing VOCs treatment to promote the industry's green and healthy development — firmly seizing development opportunities and exploring the use of new technologies, new business formats and new business models to help Suzhou's printing industry develop with high quality.

As Suzhou's economy and culture continue to develop and progress, people's demand for printed matter as a carrier of culture and education keeps increasing. As a major manufacturing city, Suzhou's demand for supporting products for manufacturing, such as packaging printed matter, is also growing day by day; it is expected that by 2025 the packaging and printing market of the whole of Suzhou 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