Facilitated by journalist, author and former rugby player, Peter FitzSimons, the opening PrintEx Forum – Control Your Future – set the benchmark for what is sure to be the start of ongoing print industry discussion and debate.
The panel was led by keynote presenter, Gordon Towell, group chief executive, Geon Group who provided a thought-provoking overview of some of the many challenges for the industry.
Referring to the impact of globalisation, Towell said that consolidation is happening in every industry across the world, with businesses getting cleverer at compartmentalising and addressing individual customer needs.
"If we're not listening to customers, we're dead. As a generalisation, printers forgot this along the way and allowed other participants to come into the industry. As customers get bigger and more sophisticated, they want suppliers to be more sophisticated and offer a broader range of products."
However, the issue of prime concern was the growth of offshore printing centre, in particular China.
Panel member Mark Reid, Director, SEP Sprint said that China "looms larger than anything" and that in dealing with China, it is important to understand that China is about three things: scale (everything is huge), perspective (the world is its market) and attitude to risk (who will buy?).
"What flows through is that the customers drive all their decisions. The Chinese are very easy to buy from, they are organised and they make the customer happy."
Reid said the Chinese print industry is growing by 15 per cent per annum and the country expects to be the dominant print centre in the world by 2020.
But he said there were a number of factors in the Australian industry's favour.
Local printers have the advantage where customers are time-senstive, or only order on an ad-hoc basis. Cutting costs to supply chain and manufacture will improve ability to compete. Warehousing is the hidden cost of dealing China, he said, when containerloads need to be stored.
"And it would be pretty hard to mount a direct marketing campaign out of China.
"But the biggest competitive advantage is around environmental/OHS issues and for China, these won't go away. China is improving itself, but their credibility is low. We need to market ourselves around all the things we have done to make our workplaces safer and better."
