Packaging / Advertising & Office

Recently, Starlight Group (00403), a major Hong Kong-owned printing company, released its 2020 financial report. The company’s revenue was HK$1.057 billion (the same unit below), a year-on-year decline of 7%, and a loss of 98.525 million was recorded. This figure is lower than the HK$1.128 billion in 2007.

Turning the time back for another year, Starlight Group achieved revenue of HK$1.136 billion in 2019, a sharp decrease of 20.62% year-on-year, which is much larger than the decline in 2020, indicating that the epidemic is not the main factor.

Xingguang Group was established in Hong Kong in 1970, Shenzhen Xingguang was established in 1992, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1993, and then Guangzhou, Suzhou and Shaoguan factories were established in 1994, 2002 and 2003 respectively. In 1999, Starlight's revenue of 391 million Hong Kong dollars was at the top of the industry.

In the past 20 years, the peak of Starlight Group's revenue appeared in the 2016 fiscal year, which was HK$1.62 billion. Since then, Starlight Group's revenue has entered a downward path.

The main products of Xingguang include: children's books (pop-up books), greeting cards, toy packaging, cosmetics packaging, wine packaging, etc. The production process of these products is typically labor-intensive. During the peak period, the number of Starlight employees exceeded 10,000, and then decreased year by year. By the end of September 2017, there were more than 5,500 people. In recent years, Starlight has encountered difficulties in recruiting workers in China, which may be the root cause of its decline in revenue.

In order to cope with the challenge of the rapid increase in the labor force, Starlight Group began to relocate from Shenzhen as early as three years ago, stopped recruiting new employees, gradually demobilized middle-level managers, and gradually moved production equipment to the Shaoguan factory. At the same time, the Group is actively promoting the optimization of internal operating procedures, the upgrading and transformation of the enterprise resource planning system, automation and the comprehensive promotion of the "Amoeba Management" project to improve staff efficiency.

As early as 2016, Starlight Group established the Qianhai Rasmann Intelligent System (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., dedicated to the development of industrial robots to replace labor. Five years later, we could not wait for the news that the company has made breakthroughs in industrial robots, but we have witnessed the steadily declining revenue of the company.

So, will Starlight Group's road of smart printing continue?