2009 Printing Industry Keyword: Industrial Revitalization Plan

Industrial revitalization plans are guiding development planning documents issued by the State Council to respond to the economic crisis and target industries of strategic significance. Among the eleven industrial revitalization plans the State Council has rolled out to date, none is devoted specifically to the printing industry, and the reason is simple: although people working in the printing industry like to point to its total output value to demonstrate the industry's importance, objectively speaking printing is merely a subordinate service industry, and the development of the printing industry has never been elevated to the level of a national strategy.

Nevertheless, the absence of an industrial revitalization plan aimed specifically at the printing industry does not mean the printing industry has been forgotten. In fact, printing has already been incorporated into the national revitalization and development framework as part of the cultural industry, and the revitalization plans for the electronic information industry and the logistics industry also cover some segments of the printing industry.

A warm breeze stirs at the start of the year

At the beginning of 2009, China's State Council successively issued adjustment and revitalization plans for the textile, steel, automobile, shipbuilding, equipment manufacturing, electronic information, light industry, petrochemical, logistics and nonferrous metals industries. These ten industries bear on the national economy and people's livelihood, and at a time when the economic crisis was arriving, focusing on ensuring the sound development of these industries was an indispensable foundation for maintaining China's rapid and stable economic growth. In fact, these industrial adjustment and revitalization plans had already begun to be linked, to a greater or lesser degree, with the development of the printing industry.

For example, in the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Electronic Information Industry, in Chapter IV, "Policy Measures", Item 7, "Strengthening the Building of Independent Innovation Capability", the formulation of key standards for RFID and digital rights management has been raised to a level on a par with TD-SCDMA, terrestrial digital television and mobile TV. RFID and digital rights management are precisely a recent development focus of the printing industry and the intersection where printing and the IT industry converge; these peripheral fields have already become a breakthrough point for some printing enterprises in implementing their transformation strategies.

And in the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Logistics Industry, not only is the efficiency of logistics distribution for publications raised to the same level as that for food, salt and tobacco, but the development of labeling technology is also specifically mentioned. Among this, the statement on "improving and promoting the article numbering system, widely applying automatic identification and marking technologies such as barcodes, smart labels and radio frequency identification (RFID) as well as electronic data interchange (EDI) technology, developing visualization technology, cargo tracking technology and rapid cargo sorting technology, and increasing investment in the research, development and application of RFID and mobile logistics information service technologies and standards.

Actively developing and utilizing new transport technologies such as the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), geographic information system (GIS), vehicle information and communication system (VICS), electronic toll collection (ETC) and intelligent transport system (ITS), and strengthening research on the security system of logistics information systems. Strengthening the research, development and production of logistics technical equipment and encouraging enterprises to adopt specialized logistics technical equipment for warehousing and transport, loading and unloading, sorting and packaging, and barcode printing" — what these statements promote is by no means only the development of the logistics industry; this looks more like a new development opportunity offered to the printing industry.

Admittedly, neither the formulation of the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Electronic Information Industry nor that of the Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Logistics Industry was in essence aimed specifically at the printing industry, but for a printing industry that has run into a development bottleneck, these policies bring a faint hint of warmth and a glimmer of dawn for the industry's future development.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362228.html