Printers have always been inventive people. From simple work-arounds and on-the-fly fixes, to an astonishing array of inventions that have little to do with print but have changed the world; printers and the printing industry are often the unsung heroes of civilisation itself. Well may we talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules, Hecter and Lysander but a sizable proportion of the tow-row-row hurrahs should go to printers.
Shall we start with electricity? Not an invention, agreed – it was a discovery but it took a printer, Benjamin Franklin to work out that lightening had a positive and a negative, could be conducted via a rod and was fluid in its nature. The schoolboy howlers that it was really Frenchman ‘Volt-aire’ or James ‘Watt’ do not apply; it was the polymath printer Franklin, who also gave us bi-focal spectacles, swimming fins, the slow-combustion stove, the functional odometer and perhaps the most influential documents of the modern era – the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Pardon my parochial indulgence, but ice-making and refrigeration were invented by an Australian printer, Scottish immigrant James Harrison around 1840. Working on a newspaper in the town of Geelong, he observed that, when he cleaned his metal type with an ether solution and then blew on it, ice crystals would form. Harrison experimented and came up with the world’s first ice-making machine capable of producing commercial quantities. It was exported, copied and improved upon all over the world. Fittingly for an Australian, Harrison is lauded in the Czech town of Pilsen, for making possible the sustainable production of that fine beer Pilsner, by enabling constant cold temperature brewing, previously carried out deep inside caves.
A Viennese émigré living in London around 1942 invented the printed circuit; hardly surprising for a printer. Paul Eisler then licensed a Camberwell Lithographer, Henderson & Spalding, to commercialise it under a newly-formed subsidiary, Technograph. Thus was born electronic miniaturisation that ultimately led to the Integrated Circuit and silicon chip. Silicon chips are still produced by a process called Photolithography and the world’s leading producer of equipment to make and clean them is Prepress and CtP pioneer, Dainippon Screen.
But this is not just a rambling history lesson bragging about past achievements of printers. Today, all over the world people with precision print training are progressing with the production of functional printed solar cells using ‘solar ink.’ Once developed to a level where efficiency and longevity are commercially acceptable, cheap, printable solar panels could revolutionise that way the world uses energy and spell the decline of big oil.
Because the Chinese and Koreans invented printing with movable type, it may be appropriate to reference the Year of the Rooster in the lunar calendar scheme of things. It begins on January 28th 2017 Gregorian-style, about one week after Donald Trump assumes Presidency of the USA. Both might be described as wake-up calls.
Daily print newspaper circulation change by region
What’s in store for the world’s printing industry in this Rooster year? A glimpse at the latest global newspaper circulation statistics from WAN-Ifra is a useful as a bellwether and starting point. Over the past five years:
Asia, particularly India and China, are becoming the powerhouses of world printing. The sheer scale and growth of the Chinese printing market are bewildering, with over 102,000 businesses employing more than 3.5 million people. (source: PEIAC). 2014 output value was approximately USD$160 billion. Growth is still tracking at over 5% pa.
Europe, measured in EU members including the soon-to-Brexit UK, claims around 120,000 companies and 770,000 employees. In comparable 2014 exchange rates, this is around USD$123 billion
Data is not yet in but 2016 was predicted to be the year in which the Chinese printing industry would overtake the USA in output value. Consider that the USA market is around 30,000 businesses and 450,000 employees and it’s not hard to see the significance of cheap abundant labour in China, and inefficiencies in European printing. Interestingly, the largest printer in China is in fact the holding division of US print giant RR Donnelly.
The largest and highest growth sector for world printing is packaging and labels. This has delivered windfalls to China’s printers as more and more manufacturing shifts from West to East. Where the goods are made, so the cartons, outer boxes and labels are printed.
Will the declines in the printing industries of Western developed economies continue in 2017? Even though they are still very substantial industries when all sectors are combined, can the downward arrows on the graphs be slowed or reach a plateau?
Perhaps this is where a bit of necromancy and inspection of tea-leaves comes in but I have a feeling 2017 will be the year that the declines in developed nation printing industries could be arrested. They had to happen; our industries were bloated with massive over-capacity coupled with lower demand and the inevitable march of the internet.
Modern print businesses are a delight to behold, with their automated workflows, low environmental impacts, diverse production including wide-format, flatbed UVs, product embellishing and of course digital-offset mixes. With many printers renewing their presses and ancillaries more frequently, quite recent and low-impression machines are coming onto markets more often.
At the macro-economic level, if the Presidential promise of the world’s greatest economy – the USA – is kept, we may see a slowing of the easy ride that the West has handed to China for two decades. The Yuan/RMB may actually be required to reflect a true exchange rate and the dumping of products might be subject to tariffs. A quasi-Brexited UK might do the same. The EU might look and be tempted.
This may be good or bad, I am certainly not qualified to say, but the zeitgeist is in the air. The other influence is that of a polarisation of printing businesses into large groups and SMEs. Digital is cheap to get into compared to offset, flexo or gravure and we see many start-ups or business morphings into all-digital, small but profitable and good growth businesses. This is particularly so in the wide-format sector.
Smaller, localised and online print businesses are in a favourable position to add services to appeal to their customers. Until very recently, a print buyer would not think of asking its offset catalogue/brochure/general commercial printer to deliver point-of-purchase merchandising stands, because the service was just not offered and even if it was – outsourced.
Now we see offset printers with EFI VuteKs, HP Scitex flatbeds, Inca Digital, Canon, Screen, Mimaki UV printers and die-cutters that are CAD - controlled rather than thumping 2 tonnes of pressure down on a knife forme from a platen. Colour is closely matched to the presses and campaigns can be managed across several distant sites to be consistent and accurate, or even tailored to local market tastes.
It’s people-power where independent businesses can realise their dreams of enterprise ownership for a manageable capital cost and deliver printed products that markets demand.
They may even find that they are able to print thin solar panels that are woven into canvas to make self-powered marquees! Or fabrics used in the manufacture of custom cushions and interior décor. There’s so much more to printing than paper.
It just needs a wake-up call, and our friend the Chinese Rooster might just be the harbinger of a brighter 2017 for aware print-related businesses.
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