Chinese manufacturing project flies blind

Chinese company officials were in Australia to secure government support to open a representative office in Sydney. A possible outcome was the construction of a gravure cylinder manufacturing plant in either Sydney or Melbourne.

Printing Industries co-ordinated a delegation of major gravure industry manufacturers, users and buyers to meet the officials and discuss their investment intentions for what is considered a declining market in Australia. The Australian delegates included representatives of ANZPAC, Kirk Engineering and AEP Industries Australia & New Zealand.

Printing Industries National Director Marketing and Media Services, Joe Kowalewski, said the Chinese appeared surprised at some of the industry demographics.

“They had no idea that the Australian market uses only about 15,000 cylinders a year and is decreasing,” he said. “Their manufacturing capacity is about 28 million cylinders a year. Theoretically, they could meet the entire Australian market needs with less than a day’s production.

“It would be fair to say they appeared to have no articulate objective in mind.

“They talked about sharing technology and possibly bringing some of their own production into Australia. But given the size of the local market, it was not clear what this was intended to achieve.”

The Chinese officials were told that Australia was historically a flexographic country producing some of the world’s highest quality flexo work. It had about 30 flexo presses and four gravure. In the past 10 years some 15-20 new flexo presses had been commissioned, but only one gravure.

The Chinese officials said they considered Australia a developing country like parts of Eastern Europe. Since 2000 Dongguan had built new plants in the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Australia was the natural next step to expand their operations out of Asia potentially accessing European markets.

The NSW Department of State and Regional Development (DSRD)
NSW Trade & Investment Centre and the Australian Government’s Invest Australia agency facilitated the delegation’s visit via their representative offices in China.

Earlier this week the Victorian Government confirmed that it had been approached to assist Dongguan and sought Printing Industries advice on the proposal.