I am writing this article from Shanghai, China, where I have come to make a couple of presentations at a conference. Coming to China, and in particular Shanghai, is an amazing experience. It is not just the culture, but it is coming to one of the few areas of the world where one can see and feel real dynamic change and progress taking place. This is my third trip to China, and each time I am amazed at just how much progress has taken place since my last visit.

The Chinese economy appears to be in a state of continuous boom, and there is so much new building going on to cater for this. The conference I am speaking at is organized by Fuji Xerox and is their Premier Partners Congress, where their key customers from the Asia Pacific region come together. The attendees come from countries all over this area including Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It is an ideal experience to get a good feel for what is happening in the digital printing market in this part of the world. I do not however plan to cover much about this in this article, but instead want to look at the Chinese print market, and assess what challenges and opportunities it may generate for printing in the rest of the world.

In a presentation given by Haixiang Shen, President of China Printing (Group) Corporation, I gathered a number of major facts about the Chinese printing market. It is a market with over 94,000 printing establishments, and it is claimed to be the third largest base for printing in the world after USA and Japan (I am not sure how it compares with the German print market). Unlike other world print markets it is growing substantially, and has seen up to 15% growth rate for a number of years. Ongoing growth rates are expected to continue at around 15% for commercial printing and packaging, with a 30% growth rate being expected in the adoption of computer to plate and digital printing. By 2020 the industry is predicted to have a size around US$120 billion.