# Printing & Packaging Industry Technology Analysis Under Shifting Global Dynamics
The global situation has been anything but stable since 2020. For the printing and packaging industry, the ripple effects go beyond supply chain headaches. They are reshaping how equipment is built, what technology is inside it, and who controls the supply of critical components.
This article breaks down the macro forces at play and what they mean for the technology powering printing and packaging machinery.
How the Macro Environment Is Hitting the Industry
Social Factors
From 2020 through 2022, COVID disrupted the packaging printing industry in waves. Orders shrank. Raw materials stopped flowing. Factories could not run at full capacity. Products sat waiting for delivery. For many companies, normal operations got derailed in chunks, not just temporary blips.
Export-facing equipment manufacturers faced an especially rough time. Machines shipped overseas could not be installed or commissioned properly. Technicians could not travel. Customers could not get their new lines running.
Domestic environmental policies and industry access regulations are pushing the sector toward consolidation. Capacity is concentrating in larger, more efficient players. The trend is clear: the factories that can produce at lower cost with higher efficiency will absorb the rest.
Economic Factors
The US-China trade war and the Russia-Ukraine conflict drove raw material costs up. Printing and packaging companies saw their expenses rise without matching profit growth. Many responded by tightening investment and taking a wait-and-see approach.
Chip shortages from the trade conflicts hit harder than most people realize. Industrial control components that depend on semiconductors — HMI panels, PLCs, drives, sensors — have been in short supply with no sign of relief. These components are the brains of printing and packaging machinery, and without them, machines cannot be delivered or commissioned on schedule.
How This Affects Technology Development
This is where the real concern sits.
The Bottleneck Problem: Industrial Control Systems
Almost every printing and packaging machine made today, whether for publication or packaging, runs on foreign-brand control systems. Siemens, Rockwell, ABB, Schneider, Bosch Rexroth, Beckhoff, Baumuller, Yaskawa, Mitsubishi — the list goes on. Domestic industrial control systems appear in a handful of small operations but are nearly invisible among mainstream equipment manufacturers.
Some progress has been made. Chinese-made servo motors have reached production maturity and are starting to see batch adoption. Drives lag further behind, with noticeable weaknesses in precision and high-speed control. And PLCs, the core of any control system, remain the weakest link. Most domestic control system vendors do not have their own PLC. Those that do cannot meet performance requirements.
Even where decent drives and PLCs exist domestically, the chips inside them are still imported. Inventory among Chinese control system makers is estimated at less than two years. Beyond that, the outlook depends entirely on when the global chip supply situation eases.
Right now, many printing and packaging equipment companies are effectively waiting for components. Lead times of eight months or longer are common. The industry is stuck.
The Innovation Gap: Automation, Digitalization, Intelligence
Automated printing is standard practice abroad. In China, outside of a handful of companies that have imported advanced equipment, commercially available automated printing presses are almost nonexistent.
The automation modules that need to be adopted include:
- Fully automatic web splicing and rewinding
- Automatic tape splicing
- Automatic impression roller exchange
- Automatic plate cylinder washing and changing
- Full-width temperature-controlled color registration
- Demand-based air volume and damper control in drying systems
- Automatic tension adaptation for laminating different materials
- Semi-flexible coating systems for hard and soft aluminum and film applications
Then there is the information layer. Every equipment manufacturer uses a different control system with its own communication protocol. Getting real-time production data from one machine to another, or from the machine to a central system, is a problem that most factories have not solved.
Factory digitalization, where it exists, tends to be fragmented. Different business functions are supported by isolated systems. Data gets generated in duplicate and inconsistencies pile up. These silos will eventually require expensive data cleaning — a hidden cost that will compound when the industry tries to move toward true digitalization and intelligence.
Customer data, supplier data, process data, production data — all of it needs to be fully digitalized, not bolted onto an existing IT framework. The goal is a unified network with no broken links, where information systems and automation equipment feed each other data that actually gets used.
True smart factories with self-learning production equipment and integrated management systems? That is still a long way off.
The Environmental Technology Challenge
Green manufacturing is a permanent topic for the printing industry. The approaches fall into two camps: source control and end-of-pipe treatment.
Source Control
Solvent-based ink recovery technology is fully mature for single-solvent systems. But the capital cost of recovery equipment puts it out of reach for most printing companies.
Water-based gravure ink for plastic film is still a work in progress. Current formulations require significant alcohol content to function. Issues with scratch resistance, lamination strength, and color saturation remain unresolved. The paper packaging segment is further ahead — over 30% of gravure applications now use water-based ink.
Decorative paper printing is a standalone success story. Nearly 100% of decorative paper printing uses water-based ink. The environmental problem is solved, though high energy consumption is still a concern.
Flexo water-based ink on plastic behaves similarly to paper gravure. It offers better lamination strength and is worth promoting in regions where color saturation requirements are moderate and alcohol emissions are not an issue.
UV ink at 100% solids works on virtually any substrate. But its primary application is offset printing. The photoinitiator safety question limits it to non-food and non-pharma packaging.
EB ink at 100% solids has no photoinitiator issue and works on any substrate. It can run on satellite flexo and satellite offset presses. But low-energy EB curing units are still in the development stage domestically, and imported units are expensive — upward of 5 million RMB — with potential supply restrictions.
End-of-Pipe Treatment
Regenerative Thermal Oxidizers (RTO) handle mixed organic solvents effectively. But carbon credit costs for operating them are coming, and that will add another line item to every printer’s operating budget.
Looking Ahead
No industry operates in isolation anymore. The printing and packaging equipment sector is feeling pressure from trade policy, chip supply, environmental regulation, and technology bottlenecks all at once.
The directions that matter are decarbonization, localization of core technology and components, and closing the automation gap between domestic equipment and what is standard internationally. None of these will be solved quickly. But they define where the industry has to go.
This article was originally written by Kang Yanping and Xue Zhicheng for Pack168.com and has been translated and adapted for an international audience.
