When was the last time you walked into a print company that employed 1,000 staff? Unless you work for Polestar or St Ives or one of the other big groups, it was probably a while ago. Only a few firms in the UK market have that many workers, and they are the groups; no single plant comes anywhere close.
But in some parts of the world, a printer with 1,000 staff is considered average size and firms can employ as many as 20,000 people, on giant campuses with housing and leisure facilities as well as the sheds that we would recognise as print plants.
I’m talking, of course, about China, the planet’s most populous country and, in the past decade, the scene of its most dramatic economic explosion. And at the heart of China’s print export business is Hong Kong, the former British colony which has been a special administrative region of the country for the last decade.
Rapid increase
Print exports from Hong Kong totalled $2.2bn (£1.2bn) in 2006, with around $262m of that going to the UK, the region’s second biggest international market after the US. It may not sound huge, but that figure is growing rapidly, at a rate of between 12% and 23% per year since 2004. As print is increasingly outsourced from the UK to lower-cost economies – much to Eastern Europe, but also to India and China – that figure is sure to rise further.
In reality, though, relatively little printing now goes on in Hong Kong’s cramped archipelago. Although the region has around 4,200 print companies, most of those are SMEs employing fewer than 10 staff; official figures state that at the end of 2005, there were just 37,063 print workers in Hong Kong. Print may still be Hong Kong’s biggest manufacturing industry, but it is declining.
All that belies, though, a more significant trend. While print is declining in Hong Kong, firms from the region are setting up in mainland China, where tax breaks, cheaper land and low labour costs create extremely attractive conditions to set up manufacturing plants.
One such company is Starlite Holdings, founded in 1970 as a small Hong Kong letterpress shop. It took until 1992 to establish a manufacturing presence in mainland China, in the city of Shenzhen. Now, that plant employs 6,000 people and Starlite is one of China’s biggest print firms, with 10,000 staff in a growing network of manufacturing bases. It specialises in packaging, labels and children’s books, and counts Intel, Nestlé, Dior and Philips among its household-name clients.
Richard Lim, senior vice-president marketing and sales at Starlite, says that one of the firm’s biggest selling points is its sheer manpower. “In children’s books, we are very clear that our focus is in hand finishing,” he says. “Plain hardcase books are becoming a commodity– everyone knows how to print a book. Our advantage is the low price of hand labour.”
Hung Hing is another firm which originated in the 1950s as a small printer in Hong Kong but has grown into a multinational, multi-site group specialising in book printing, packaging and paper manufacture. It now has a turnover of HK$3.1bn, or around £200m, and its UK clients include M&S, WHSmith and Penguin.
A giant among plants
The firm’s latest project is a plant in Heshan, in the Guandong province. This is a plant like no other; it is planned to stretch to 480,000m2, and could employ up to 20,000 people.
Matthew Yum, managing director of the firm, is also clear the site’s scale – hand-finishing is, again, a key focus – will make it an attractive prospect. But like many others in the growing Chinese print market, he says exports are only part of the story.
Presenting the plant to London print buyers last year, he said: “Heshan will enable us to double our book printing capacity, improve our service to the growing international market, and meet the needs of an expanding domestic market.”
Growing interest
But Western printers still have areas where they can hold off the Chinese onslaught. Clearly, anything requiring a quick turnaround can’t be produced. And while slow-turnaround products such as colour books and packaging are big business in China – packaging is often produced for goods also made in the country – there are plenty of areas where it can get tricky to do business.
Starlite’s Lim explains that Chinese export laws ban the production of some of types of print. Pornography is out of the question, for instance, while maps can also cause political problems. “The government gets sensitive about maps showing Taiwan,” he says. “It’s a judgement call – but it’s better to get approval in advance than to get to customs and have problems.”
Nevertheless, there is a strong interest in the export opportunities in Hong Kong and China from print buyers in Europe and the US. Last year’s Hong Kong International Printing and Packaging Fair attracted print buyers in their hundreds from Europe and almost 10,000 from around the world, with 370 exhibitors looking to hawk their wares. The next edition of the fair, on 28 April-1 May this year, is expected to be even bigger.
Chinese print is growing at an astonishing pace.
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