China has become a hot spot in the world ink industry

With China becoming the fastest growing economy in the Asia-Pacific region, the world's major ink manufacturers have made major investment activities in China, such as: Toyo Ink, Sakata Inx, DIC, Flint Ink, and Tung Wah Ink. Flint Ink's news ink factory in Beijing, Toyo Ink announced that it will invest 5 billion yen (about 345 million yuan) to establish a new sales and manufacturing company in Shanghai Hanjiang Industrial Park - Shanghai Toyo Ink Manufacturing Co., Ltd. The new company will provide a range of Toyo Ink's existing products including packaging materials. Another Japanese ink giant SakataInx Co., Ltd. also established a subsidiary in Shanghai for ink production and sales. The company's name is Sakata Ink Shanghai Co., Ltd. The company mainly produces packaging liquid inks and gravure inks, with a planned annual output of 3,600 tons. SakataInx Co., Ltd. has also established a mid-term business plan for 2004-2006. Through this plan, the company will increase its ink sales in the Asia Pacific region from 6.7 billion yen in 2003 to 10 billion yen in 2006. T&K TOKA inks will invest 2.1 billion Yen (approximately 145 million RMB) in the next five years to substantially increase the number of offset printing inks and UV inks for Chinese subsidiaries (Hanghua Ink Chemical Co., Ltd. and Donghua Guangzhou Ink Co., Ltd.) With the production capacity, the completion of this investment will increase the production capacity of Tung Wah Group's Chinese subsidiary by 90% to 30,000 tons per year. In comparison, the quality of foreign ink products is higher than that of domestic ink manufacturers, but their price is often 3-5 times that of domestic ink. Therefore, in the case where many customers do not explicitly specify the use of imported or joint venture ink, manufacturers generally use domestic high-grade ink for printing production. However, according to the development trend of corrugated cartons, the direct offset printing is a fine corrugated printing solution. Therefore, the performance of water-based inks must be continuously improved in order to compete for the offset ink market.

As we all know, the profit of the carton has been minimal. Therefore, carton factories and printing factories have relatively tight control over their costs, and they often desperately lower ink prices when purchasing. At present, the price of ink and wash is low, and the profit margin is relatively small. Generally, the ink-and-rollery factory is poor enough to cope with reducing costs. There is no time and sufficient funds to develop products and improve product quality to better serve carton factories. (Usually the cost of ink in a carton is less than 0.03%, and spending so much time and energy on ink prices is not worth it.)

Source: Global Corrugated Box industry