ChinaPrint - The Last of the Real Print Shows?

I wore short trousers on my first visit to a print show. It was IPEX 1962 in London’s Earl’s Court and I was a schoolboy of 12. Dornier Machinery, the printing engineering and used machinery dealing company started by my father and my uncle just after World War II, manufactured a small-format offset proofing press, the Dornier Colortone, and I went along with a mate to see the company’s first ever exhibition stand.

It wasn’t exactly swamped by visitors – the presses had a limited market, art colleges and artists primarily, and it was tucked away in the shadow of a huge Italian flexo press which thundered into action every couple of hours, to be followed five minutes later by loud cursing and wailing in Italian as the web broke.

From 1972 I was a regular visitor to every Drupa and IPEX, the two big international exhibitions, with occasional forays to the French and Italian national shows. In those days the successful manufacturers were making plenty of money – demand was high in the post-war boom years, and they vied with each to have the biggest stands on which they could jam every model they made – an enormous number in the cases of Heidelberg and Roland, for example. All were set up to run, with printing crews giving noisy demonstrations every hour or so to awe-struck visitors. Roland dominated offset printing in those days, and their Favorit, Parva, Rekord, 600 and even the Ultra giants were shown in single, two and four colour versions. Anything beyond a 4 colour was, for most printers, a distant dream, though some spoke in hushed tones of distant projects for five and six colours. Heidelberg was still famous for its letterpress ranges – platens and the flatbed KS and SB-line cylinder presses, single colour though some came with strange rotary letterpress units plonked on the end to make them two colours. But things were changing – the KOR and then KORD and KORS models had been introduced from the mid-1960s and were phenomenally successful, staying in production until well into the 1980s. These machines were slow, but the secret of their success was that their controls and operation were so similar to the letterpress machines – very easy transitional machine for a letterpress printer – just add water. Heidelberg had also introduced the S-line single and two colour models in the late 60s – a dazzling array of models in different sheet sizes - SOR, SORK, SORM, SORD and SORS. Each and every one of these in every possible configuration would be on show. The ill-fated Rotaspeed was Heidelberg’s inadequate response to Roland’s all-conquering Rekord, and there was no indication in the early 70s that Heidelberg would ever successfully compete against let alone supplant Roland in the multi-colour offset market. That had to await the arrival of the Speedmaster, without doubt the world’s most successful multi-colour press.

KBA RA 75 PRO 6 colour plus coater

Most of the market leaders then are still the market leaders today, the German and Swiss giants like Heidelberg, KBA, Stahl, Polar, Wohlenberg, Mueller Martini and Bobst, but a host of second division players have effectively disappeared – the likes of Color Metal, Aurelia, Nebiolo, Miehle, Linotype, Intertype, Harris and Solna. As a stray asteroid caused the great extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs, so the whole of the once mighty UK printing machinery industry has been submerged and names like Crabtree, George Mann, Baker Perkins, Timson, Crosfield, Victory Kidder, Rotaprint and Furnival now linger only in the minds of a few old-timers, victims of lack of investment and German genius.

RMGT 4 colour with LED UV

The Heidelberg, KBA, Stahl, Polar, Wohlenberg, Mueller Martini and Bobst brands are still market leaders, but they now operate in a very different economic landscape and have dramatically cut-back their presence at the European and American print shows. Heidelberg pulled out of IPEX 2014 completely and their presence at Drupa 2016 was a shadow of its former self, with the €10 million cost pushing them into the red. A visitor from Mars at recent shows would conclude that offset printing was a sideshow to digital and very large format printing.

By contrast, going to ChinaPrint was for me like going back to happier times. Although the most jaw-dropping digital technology was on display, the beautiful great metal monsters dominated the exhibition halls, and there could not be a clearer demonstration of the importance of the Chinese market to the European and Japanese press manufacturers. Heidelberg showed off a CX 102-7+L seven colour with coater, a CX 75-4 B2 press with Drystar LED and a CS92-4 LE UV A1 press – apparently if you want an 18,000 iph XL in China the only way to source it is through pressXchange.

KBA, celebrating 200 years of manufacturing with an interesting historical montage of its products and history, showed an RA 106-5 five colour with coater and a Rapida 75PRO-6+L, both sporting “Sold to” signs. Komori had probably the biggest press at the show, a Lithrone GX 40 RP 8 unit double-decker B1 press (again with UV – I’m seeing a pattern here…), a model of which they have sold just short of 100. They also had an A1 press, a GL437, with a relatively modest top speed of 15,000 sph. RMGT, the new manifestation of the combined Ryobi and Mitsubishi printing machinery operations, was demonstrating a 5 colour B1 press, the RMGT105OAS-5.

But the European and Japanese manufacturers are far from having it all their own way. I was amazed at the range of Chinese-built equipment. I’m not an engineer by training, but I have worked with printing equipment most of my life, and the engineering and design looked pretty good and solid to me. But who buys the 30 or so automatic die cutters from different manufacturers – most suspiciously similar to the Bobst – or the 20 plus Jagenberg Diana doppelgangers is a mystery to me. A number of the Chinese manufacturers insisted that they buy their roller bearings from Europe – perhaps an indication of how Chinese quality is still perceived by some outsiders. I was impressed as well by the number of UV LED products on display, the number of companies making spare parts for German machines and the whole array of consumable manufacturers from inks to plates to chemicals.

Digital and wide format digital presses were not as predominant as in the European and US shows, though HP, as always, had a huge presence. Unlike my friend and pressXchange contributor Andy McCourt, about the same as age as I am, I wander through the digital and pre-press halls with a mixture of awe and incomprehension: what I understand are feeders dancing, cylinders whirring and knives crashing through reams of paper.

Komori Lithrone SRA1 4 colour

Visitors to the show are over-whelmingly Chinese, perhaps understandable given the cost, time and bureaucracy involved in getting a visa. There was a contingent from China’s fast developing neighbour India and a sprinkling of Europeans – some, like the gregarious Ian Murphy and Jason O’Brien from Portman Graphics in Dublin, looking for the outstanding manufacturers of the future to represent in their markets, and many of the others machinery dealers – pressXchange advertisers to a man (no women here) – for whom China is an essential and voracious market. I spotted Bill Jones from Exel, buoyed up by his purchase of a major sheetfed printer, Dean Becket of DPM taking a rest from his long-distance charity cycle rides, Robin Vauvelle of White Horse, Julian Brown from Pinheoros and Giles Smith of Printing and Graphic Machinery. I came across fewer dealers from mainland Europe than I expected. Remarkably Lutz Redman of Paradowski, who graces every print show I’ve been to in the last 15 years, was missing, though his partner Oliver Havemann was there, as was his Hamburg neighbour Lukas Silezin from SHS-CAS, Axel Langelüddecke from German Graphic Equipment and Herman De Graaf from EGS in Holland. Nearly all were invited along with me to a very pleasant evening hosted by the affable Ted Chan of Wealth China Corporation in the unlikely setting of Beijing’s German bar – with very authentic schnitzels and excellent German beers (of which I tasted too many…). Ted deals in used equipment but also represents several Chinese manufacturers in world markets.

Many of the European dealers seem to be constantly circling the globe looking for business, sourcing equipment, meeting customers and checking on installations. Some like Giles Smith would have barely time to change their socks back at home before heading off to Expo Gráfica which started on the 17th May in Guadalajara, Mexico – about as far from Beijing as you can go before leaving Earth’s gravity. I didn’t envy them that: a few nights in my own bed suited me just perfectly.