Frank Romano: This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. We’re here in Hong Kong with the last of our series on Chinese printing. So, Joe Pasky, what are the trends here? Is offset lithography still the main printing process?

Joe Pasky: Oh, I believe it is. There’s a lot of offset presses in production over here. The bigger companies will have 10, 15, 20 offset presses; some of them 30 or 40 offset presses. And it’s still the main manufacturing method for books and commercial printing that’s done here. I think there is a trend in packaging printing for both gravure and flexo which Gary’s the expert at.

Frank Romano: So, Gary, tell us what’s happening with flexo?

Gary Newbold: Yeah, I’m the real expert, that’s for sure. Gary Newbold. We’ve been in China, both of us, for respectively ten years each and on the flexo side in America you’re using flexo widely for the narrow web format for making labels. Here it’s almost unheard of. There are quite a few machines out there but labels mostly produced with letterpress here or gravure even. On flexo wide web format, CI presses, it’s been a real struggle to gain a foothold and penetrate into the gravure market. The numbers that I’ve seen most recently from companies like DuPont and Flint seem to state that wide web flexo for LDP has penetrated into that market by about five percent – three to five percent. So there’s just huge opportunities to go. The problem is that the gravure cylinder cost remains very, very inexpensive in China where the photopolymer image and delivered plate costs tend to be sometimes five to more times higher than comparable gravure.

Frank Romano: So what’s happening with digital printing? I understand there are a lot of Indigos here in China.

Gary Newbold: Well it’s amazing. They’re out there and there are companies that just do digital printing but what we’re seeing a lot is there are companies who historically have been conventional offset printing companies who were doing packaging and have moved into and now offer digital printing as an add on, as a value add, as an additional service. So they incorporate, they integrate these two processes and they’re catering to market niches which are really, really right up the alley of shorter run, just-in-time, on-demand, digital printing with no waste. Brochure printing booklet, pamphlet type printing. But now the move has been – and we’ve been moving some of the art clients into using digital printing for labels, for limited – like sales samples and things like that. And also for limited small run packaging. This is the next trend.

Frank Romano: And so are we seeing more – is it short run printing here in China?

Gary Newbold: Well, yes and no. You have some clients like the big guys, Unilever, P&G, they’re ordering millions and millions at a time. So the answer is no. But just-in-time has been around for decades in America and it hasn’t escaped finding it’s ugly way here in China too. Just-in-time printing affects us all so you have order quantities that tend to be shorter all across the board – offset, flexo and gravure.

Frank Romano: So China is still using all the processes, flexo being the weakest of all.

Joe Pasky: Yeah but flexo’s growing. In just the last few years ten more wide web CI flexo presses have come online and P&G is now converting quite a few of their diaper product which are four color process plus two spot, sometimes three spot using wide web flexo solvent based ink. So that trend is gonna continue.

Frank Romano: Great. Well thank you both very, very much.

Joe Pasky: Thank you.

Gary Newbold: Thank you.