Packaging / Advertising & Office

Quanzhou is a strong printing city in Fujian Province. The number and scale of printing companies account for one-third of the province. There are more than 1,200 printing companies (including typing and copy shops) at various levels and more than 50,000 employees. After development, Quanzhou has initially formed four major printing concentrated areas: the central city, Jinjiang, Shishi, and Nan'an. The total printing output value of the four places accounts for more than 90% of the city, and the printing industry cluster effect and scale benefit are obvious.

But at the same time, overcapacity, serious homogeneity competition and other industry ailments have also plagued printing companies. Traditional printing companies must accelerate their transformation and upgrading. So, where to turn? How to turn? Reporter conducted an interview.

Cultural and creative injects soul into the printing industry

The printing industry in Quanzhou has developed rapidly, and has now developed into a complete printing industry chain including R&D and design, plate printing, plastic flexible packaging, printed iron cans, paper products, special printing, and raw and auxiliary materials.

"When consumers buy a product, the first thing they come into contact with is packaging." said Ke Zunchang, president of Jinjiang Printing Association. The printing industry is closely related to daily necessities. As the "brand capital", Quanzhou's clothing, footwear and other well-known brands Numerous, none of the products of these companies need packaging to set off the quality of the product. It can be said that the importance of printing and packaging is self-evident.

"However, many colleagues stick to their original ideas, thinking that printing companies are only foundry companies and do not have their own end products. Such ideas are fettering the development of certain companies." Ke Zunchang said, it is also an foundry company. Foxconn's R&D and innovation team can make many high-tech companies in the world inseparable from their foundry business. In the same way, printing companies in Quanzhou should not be confined to the mindset of foundry, but should do everything possible to make the products of brand companies inseparable from packaging.

In the interview, Ke Zunchang has always emphasized one sentence: The development of an enterprise cannot be separated from R&D and innovation. It must have leading and innovative concepts to give customers more unique cultural and creative connotations in product packaging design.

Ke Zunchang believes that printing companies should be good at looking for cultural needs from the industry, and then inject different cultural factors into product packaging to improve product quality and added value. Such a terminal product can make people discover the delicate and unique packaging design at a glance. Not only the value of the product is increased, but the value of the packaging is also reflected.

The reporter felt the value-added effect of cultural creativity on brand manufacturers and the packaging and printing industry in the packaging and printing of a noodle manufacturer. This noodle gift box named "Fujian Noodles" is positioned as a festive noodle, with the auspicious words "Fu" and "囍" incorporated into the name; "福见" is a homophone of Fujian, which fits the local specialty attributes of the product. According to the taste characteristics of the products, the creativity has extracted the corresponding 7 traditional blessings: reunion, wealth, housewarming, birthday, wealth, academics, high rise, etc. The graphic performance not only incorporates the taste characteristics of the product, but also combines 7 auspicious elements of blessings.

Such an allegorical, unique and personalized cultural and creative design, combined with modern packaging technology, breaks through the uniformity of traditional pasta products, and achieves a breakthrough from selling products to selling culture. It is the combination of Quanzhou printing and packaging industry and cultural and creative industries. representative work.

Digitalization into the Trend of Printing Owner Flow Technology

There are many cultural and creative design products pursuing the individualization of products, and the product purchases are small and varied. This is in line with the "small batch, multi-batch" production model pursued by many manufacturing companies. However, traditional printing implements standardized production. Once the typesetting is turned on, tens of thousands of copies are printed in batches. How to achieve the connection with the current personalized, small-batch customized production has also become a barrier to the transformation of the printing industry.

How to deal with this obstacle? The introduction of digital and intelligent production and sales models has become a common choice in the industry.

The outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic has "forced" printing e-commerce to accelerate its pace of development. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, the proportion of online retail sales of physical goods in my country in the total retail sales of consumer goods in China will rise from 10.8% to 20.7% in 2020. With the increasing proportion of e-commerce sales channels, the brand's demand for printed products has also changed. The single order quantity is smaller, the batch is more, and there are stricter requirements on the delivery time of the printed products, and the demand for delivery on the same day is strong. Brands need to use this method to speed up turnover and reduce inventory at the same time, so as to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In order to meet the needs of brand customers, printing service providers must also adjust their operating models accordingly. Through digital deployment, the work process is networked and automated, so as to reduce costs, reduce errors, improve efficiency, and meet the needs of e-commerce and personalized commercial printing. Fujian Nanwang Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd., a leading printing company in our city, has independently developed a flexographic printing press and opened up a customized production line. Through the promotion platform of 3 online stores, it has realized 500 customized customized models with a minimum order. Reduce the minimum order quantity, so that more small and medium-sized enterprises have the opportunity to use environmentally friendly packaging.

The earliest talk of printing customization mainly refers to the provision of personalized customization services for individual users (C-end). Image products are the most typical representatives. Most of these products and services, such as Tiger Color, Tianyi Youfu, and Century Kaiyuan, provide such products and services. In recent years, the industry has seen more low-volume, customized services for enterprises and brand owners (B-end), more and more large-scale orders, higher repurchase frequency, and large-scale customization also create more considerable profits. For example, the cash register codes of tens of millions of offline merchants are typical products of mass customization, and many printing platforms or companies provide payment code printing customization services.

Some printing companies are based on data standardization and data flow sharing to achieve data integration, information sharing and business collaboration in product design and development, production and processing, and customer service. For example, the "Warehouse and Printing Integration" business model jointly built by Hucai, publishing houses, printing companies, and JD.com; at the China Printing Industry Innovation Conference, the "One Book Printing Intelligent Manufacturing Test Line" led by the China Academy of Printing Science was built. .

Green production dominates the future of the printing industry

In addition to the digital transformation of production and sales models, current printing companies are also facing the requirements of green transformation. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment formally issued the "Notice on Accelerating the Resolution of Current Prominent Issues in the Governance of Volatile Organic Compounds" (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice") on August 4. Among them, the control of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is an important content. The printing industry has prominent problems in VOCs emissions. The VOCs content limit standards of coatings, inks, adhesives, cleaning agents and other products are still not implemented, and there are still substandard products in the market; low (no) VOCs content coatings, inks, adhesives, etc. The replacement ratio of cleaning agent is low. The printing industry is in urgent need of a "green storm".

Walking into the printing workshop of Fujian Nanwang Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd., the fast-running production line is printing paper bag patterns. Here, the pungent ink smell disappeared, making people have an intuitive perception of the transformation and upgrading of the printing industry.

"An important indicator for evaluating the quality of paper bags is its surface printing technology. Nanwang abandoned the previous methods of offset printing and gravure printing and adopted flexographic printing technology to reduce the emission of harmful gases and make it cleaner and more environmentally friendly." Wang Xianfang, general manager of Wang Technology, introduced that the pollution emission of volatile organic compounds VOCs in the printing industry comes from a large number of solvent-based inks and a considerable proportion of diluent solvents that must be used in the printing process. Nanwang Technology’s flexographic printing uses all water-based inks. It even uses improved food-grade inks, which greatly reduces the use of organic solvents and VOCs emissions. On the basis of the environmental protection of production technology and raw materials, Nanwang Technology has also built a set of purifying and circulating sewage treatment system, which will pass the waste water generated in the production process through layers of biological purification to meet the national emission standards and save social resources.

Nanwang Technology's green development strategy is the epitome of the overall development of Quanzhou's printing industry. In order to solve the pollution problem of the printing industry, in recent years, in accordance with the overall requirements of “source emission reduction, process control, and end treatment”, Quanzhou has focused on the prevention and control of VOCs pollution in the printing industry. By establishing a long-term mechanism for ozone pollution prevention and control, enterprises are encouraged to adopt high-tech Technology, pollution control technology, clean production technology transformation and other methods to enhance the environmental protection capabilities of the printing industry, introduce tax incentives that comply with energy-saving and environmental protection projects, corporate income tax reduction and exemption, and import of advanced energy-saving and environmental protection technology and equipment, and encourage qualified enterprises to declare energy-saving and circular economy in Quanzhou Special fund subsidies, etc.

Under the guidance of the Quanzhou Municipal Government, the Quanzhou Beijing Printing Technology Service Center and the Fujian Printing and Packaging Application Technology Collaborative Innovation Center, with Jinjiang Dehong Packaging Products Co., Ltd. as the research and development base, carried out the "LED-UV-based three-dimensional curing machine curing The "System Design" project has solved the common problems of traditional printing of "large pollution, high energy consumption, short life, and fast replacement", and further promoted the green transformation of the printing industry, energy saving and consumption reduction.

The market scale of China's printing industry will still grow in the future

The "14th Five-Year Plan" and the long-term goal of 2035 clearly stated that my country will actively improve the level of public cultural services in the next five years and prosper the press and publication industry in an all-round way. At the same time, as the printing industry is closely following measures such as technological transformation and industry integration, it is expected that the market size of my country's printing industry will continue to grow but the growth rate will slow down in the future.

According to the forecast of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, the growth rate of China's printing industry market size will slow down from 2021 to 2026. The market size is expected to be nearly 1.4 trillion yuan in 2021; in 2026, the market size will reach 1.43 trillion yuan.