China Print05 – the giant is awakening

China Print in Beijing was an excellent exhibition and I think that it was the biggest exhibition in Asia this year. You only have to see the China Print exhibition bilingual catalogue to get an idea of the scale and quality of that event, let alone the actual experience of seeing so much equipment running live.

Demonstrations of equipment from Bobst, KBA, KBA Grafitec, Heidelberg, Komori, Mitsubishi, MAN Roland, Ryobi, Mitsubishi, Sakurai, Adast, Goss are just one dimension of a phenomenon that had to be experienced to be believed. China Print attracted more than 880 exhibitors occupying 92,500 square meters and about 160,000 professional visitors attended the show at the two venues about 20 minutes apart allowing for Beijing’s dense but orderly traffic.

This was an exhibition of far more interest to many Asian printers than drupa or IPEX and in spite of the linguistic constraints (that may be alleviated by the Summer Olympics in 2008) the Beijing fair will likely become one of the top four fairs in the world with its next two editions. Which of the other four major print exhibitions (drupa, Ipex, Print, and IGAS) are likely to be displaced is not entirely clear at this point. Like global warming, the change may be more sudden than most expect.

A 20-minute free bus ride connected the two locations—the China International Exhibition Centre (a modern exhibition facility with a huge Carrefour department store in one corner and new hotels next-door) and the older more traditionally designed three halls in addition to a new hall of the Agriculture center that is not far from the huge new skyscrapers of the central business district. The CIEC’s eleven modern exhibition halls contained all the international companies and the larger Chinese companies. The single largest exhibitor, Heidelberg, had its own hall.

China Print 2009 will be held in April 2009 at a new International Exhibition Centre in post Olympics Beijing. According to the organizers, about 1,000 exhibitors will participate in the show with a total show space of 100,000 square meters and 200,000 visitors will visit the show.

The Chinese Founders were there too

The exhibition was most interesting because of the diverse Chinese exhibitors in all segments and because all the major international players were present. Founder Group Electronics is the Beijing University incubated and promoted behemoth for all things prepress and all things computerised in China. It manufactures almost everything and sells everything from Chinese language fonts, to computers, switches, and computer to plate devices. Most of the CtP devices (including Agfa, Creo and Screen) sold in the country are channeled through one of the company’s divisions.

The company began with Professor Wang Xuan’s Chinese Laser Typesetting System Research Project, in 1975 historically known as Project 748. In 1987 the first full page output of a Chinese newspaper was output using the Beida Founder Electronic Publishing System, and in 1992, the PKU Founder Group was founded.

Known most widely perhaps for its Eagle RIP, the company is now doing considerable research and development in the security area. Its Superline security pattern generation software is able to generate low-resolution hidden images. It has already struck an OEM deal for such embedded security software in Konica Minolta and Kimoto photocopiers that will make it difficult to photocopy a secured document without the embedded watermark revealing itself.

Founder Electronics like the other major and mostly state funded Chinese groups that spoke at the Print Development Conference preceding the China Print exhibition are one of the best case studies for understanding the combination of Chinese government and business. The young leaders of these companies speak of the conservatism of the older generation, their readiness to collaborate with and acquire global companies, and their vision for print itself. It is refreshing to see Asians thinking about their task of looking after print and print technology in this century. Of course like all things Asian, it may be a bit too serious.

(The next part of this article will cover many other exhibitors and also the printing development conference.)