This is a response to a letter written earlier this year to Plant Engineering magazine regarding the loss of manufacturing jobs and plants.

The author of the letter to comments on the decline of press manufacturing in the U.S., especially at Goss. Blaming this on offshore competition is rather strange. Since 2000, the printing industry has lost $30 billion in annual revenues because of the Internet and other digital communications, and virtually no other cause. Newspapers have lost their cash cows, especially classified advertising, to the Internet because of businesses like Craigslist and eBay, among others. Morgan Stanley routinely shows a chart of more than 140 million classified ads in U.S. newspapers in the late 1990s, while today it is 100 million or lower. At the same time, eBay has more than 800 million items listed, and that's just one company's website.

As far as employment goes, this is the highest number of employed people in the U.S. in history. Household wealth is at record or near-record levels. While some look at service industries as a bad thing, one must remember that the biggest consumers of services are manufacturing companies. Very often labor statistics are misleading. For example, if a clerk processes payroll in a manufacturing plant, they are counted as a manufacturing worker. If the company switches to a payroll service like ADP, that shows up as a decline in manufacturing employment. Ditto for cafeteria workers: if a manufacturing business runs its own cafeteria, those workers are manufacturing workers. If they hire Amamark to do it, that shows as a decline in manufacturing workers and an increase in service workers, even though Aramark may have hired the same exact workers. Much of what was part of manufacturing companies is outsourced: financial services, maintenance, payroll and benefits services, human resource services, shipping, transportation, warehouse management, information services, are often handled by outside companies at lower cost with superior technologies and accountability, allowing manufacturing companies to handle their core businesses with greater efficiency.

Press manufacturing has always been an international business. After all, the first press was Gutenberg's in Germany. But presses and press manufacturers go where the markets are. Right now, the growth markets for printing and publishing are in the emerging markets of Asia and Eastern Europe. In addition, offset lithography is gradually being replaced by other printing technologies. Companies like Goss and Heidelberg are competing for customer investment dollars today with the likes of Xerox, Hewlett Packard, and Oce, companies that would never have been considered competitors just ten years ago. More importantly, press purchases are determined by how much intellectual content is being printed. All publishing markets are grappling with a new communications industry and new communications markets that are intensely digital, and can be accessed by consumers any where and any time in any place.

It's essential to understand that those trends have played more of a role in the reshaping and retructuring of the printing industry more than any other factor for the past seven years, and easily for the next seven. Newspapers and commercial printers are all looking for new and innovative ways to participate in the new global information distribution industry. It's essential for suppliers to the industry to be partners in that endeavor for their own, and the industry's, survival.