Organised by China Print Show Company Ltd, the seventh Beijing International Printing Technology Exhibition (China Print 2009) has successfully drawn its curtain at the New China International Exhibition Center (NCIEC) on May 16, 2009. As one of the six global leading printing trade fairs, the show succeeded in achieving a new peak making itself the biggest and the most influential printing exhibition in the year 2009.
Spanning over 110,000 square meters show space (20% more than that of the previous event), this six-day China Print 2009 attracted 1284 exhibitors from 25 countries or regions with their latest technologies and products. Over 160,000 visitor entries from more than 80 countries or regions were recorded by the entrance control system.
Despite global economic slowdown causing the show space reduction up to 10,000 square meters from predetermined area, the organisers and exhibitors were quite happy with the visitors’ response. Signage industry mavens took advantage of the show in promoting their state-of-the-art technologies apart from presenting affordable wide-format printers. Besides, printing associations from over twenty countries, including India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Iran, Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia and Egypt benefited through their visitor delegations to discover business opportunities in China.
From large-format printing segment, Hewlett-Packard (HP) participated and demonstrated live the working of some of their printers. HP Scitex LP series was one of the flagship products HP included in its product line at the recently concluded show. With its unique features that can replace eco-solvent and water-based inks, the new printer has remarkable speed, quality and environmental-friendly advantages.
On the sidelines of the event, HP’s category manager for Asia Pacific Pankaj Goswami asserted, “Our first machine is HP Scitex 65500, which is 2.5 m wide but there will be other range of sizes, bigger or smaller in the years to come.” Stating the company’s widely acclaimed wrap segment, which marks new records every year, he mentioned the recent BMW campaign measuring around 6 sq km printing produced on HP Scitex LP. “It was not all about building wrap as the signage covered whole lot of boulevards, walkways, street corners and buildings in the particular location,” he added.
In terms of specialised printings such as textile, Pankaj mentioned the example of the company’s major contribution to sporting sector, such as Barcelona Football Club. He also said that in most of sporting events across the world, HP has done printing categorically of flags, fabric hoardings, etc.
“Brand image, reliability are things that make us the first choice of most of our customers in most of our markets. We have a wide range of technologies that will cluster our products at different levels where a customer can enter at any stage whether at entry level, mid-level or high level,” said Pankaj adding that the versatility however in the printing market would go up and down in business. Giving an instance that people move business from analogue to digital; digital to wide-format, POP, sign-making, etc he mentioned that HP is a one-stop shop for all these activities.
According to Pankaj, flatbed market is now the future of signage industry where specilised POP displays, interior decoration market is picking up and it has further growth opportunity not as a printing market but a solution market.