CGS interview with Marcus Tang – trend shaping Print and Packaging in Asia

Trends Shaping Print and Packaging in Asia

As we make our way through 2022, Print Innovation Asia spoke with CGS ORIS’ Marcus Tang to chat regional plans, and identify trends shaping the print and packaging industry in Hong Kong and China.

To better serve customers in the Asia Pacific region, CGS ORIS established a branch in Hong Kong in 2008. Perfectly poised as the main hub of the region, the branch covers the whole of Asia Pacific except Japan, from business development, OEM business to technical support.

“The purpose of setting up the Asia regional office in Hong Kong is to provide direct sales and service support to our customer in this area. This office has also enabled us to strengthen our presence in this region to develop more business and support to both our customers and global partners,” said Marcus Tang, Technical Manager for Asia, CGS ORIS.

The accessible location also enabled CGS Asia to centralise its consumable supply storage in Hong Kong for customers in the region. In 2012, CGS Asia established a branch in Shanghai to better serve the Chinese-speaking region with a local presence.

“The printing markets in Hong Kong and China are very competitive. In the Greater China region especially, the printing industry is very advanced, and very quick to adapt to new technology,” said Tang.

“Our customers are mainly brand owners, regional digital printing equipment business partners and local printing companies. Most of them are looking for a flexible and open system colour management system (CMS) solution that can seamlessly integrate into their current workflow, or expand their printing workflow when they venture into something new,” said Tang.

“We also ventured into the OEM business with Chinese manufacturers. For digital printing machine manufacturers especially, we are able to integrate our CMS engines with the printing machines,” said Tang.

Colour Management and Mockup Production

When it comes to trends, there are a few main ones that are driving the demand for CGS ORIS solutions in the region, namely managing brand colour correctly and reproducing the proof or mock up based on actual material: “This trend requires a short turn over time for proof and mock up approval.”

“Since the pandemic and lockdown, we thought the business would get very slow, but surprisingly there were more demand in our solutions in this region, especially the growth in remote proofing (ORIS Color Tuner) and mock up requirement (ORIS Flexpack),” said Tang.

The ORIS Flex Pack is the most colour accurate package proofing and prototyping system in the market. The inkjet-based packaging solution delivers colour accuracy, spot varnish, embossing and foiling effects. CGS ORIS Color Tuner provides the ultimate flexibility in colour proofing technology in one package and effectively communicating colour worldwide.

Rising Trend: Multichannel Printing Process

Multichannel printing process is another growing trend in the region, especially in China: “We also experienced massive growth of the ORIS X GAMUT software in China for printing companies that ventured into multichannel printing process,” said Tang.

ORIS X GAMUT is a fully automatic colour management software for extended colour printing on digital and conventional presses. Multichannel printing enables printing not only in CMYK, but in additional colours such as violet, red, blue and green. With this technology, a 4-colour image for example, would need to be converted into the new colour space – which is where ORIS x GAMUT fits in. This is especially important in packaging, and for brand owners.

”Thus far, we have successfully implemented multichannel printing in digital printing, commercial offset printing, metal-décor/metal can printing, flexo and gravure printing,” said Tang. “Local digital printing machinery manufacturers are now building printing presses with a minimum of 8 colours. For customers who are keen to venture into this

Trends Shaping Print and Packaging in Asia

new multichannel technology, CGS is well capable and ready to provide the solutions.”

Activists in Traditional to Digital Printing Transition

“Since 2008, we’ve been focusing on digital printing for both the commercial and packaging segments. During that period of time, it was the golden time for the print industry to venture into the digital world. The transition or migration from a traditional printing process to a digital printing process provided the opportunity to place CGS in a higher competency than our competitors,” said Tang.

Additionally, CGS Asia has been heavily involved in educating and helping the print industry move towards digital together with the Hong Kong Printing Association and the printing faculty in vocational technical colleges (VTC) in the country.

“We provide technical consultancy for local and international brand owners, multi-national printing companies and strategic business partners in adapting new ISO printing standards, setting up digital mock up solutions and customising printing workflows,” said Tang. “CGS solutions are being used for ISO delegates from China (TC 170) and Hong Kong (TC 130) for Technical Research in verifying the newly amended ISO standards, as well as developing new standards. This is especially so with our ORIS CxF Toolbox for CxF/x-4 establishment,” Tang continued.

The CGS ORIS CxF Toolbox is a software solution to store, edit and communicate brand colours in a fast, reliable and safe manner. With ORIS CxF Toolbox, any PDFx file can be analyzed to extract the CxF data for tone value increase aims, colorimetry, tolerances and more. The CxF Toolbox is seamlessly connected to the CGS ORIS Color Cloud, the cloud solution provided by CGS ORIS to communicate all stored CxF data to the entire supply chain.

Looking Forward

As we’re closing in on the last quarter of the year, what can we look forward to from CGS Asia?

“We have gone through massive challenges before the pandemic first with the social movement in Hong Kong, then with the coronavirus pandemic worldwide, and now with the current dynamic zero policy in China. The merchandise trade began to recover, and as travel has opened up again, printing demand are beginning to recover as well. We’ve all had to overcome the challenges, and it hasn't stopped us from seizing opportunities to grow. With our core competencies, we believe we are more than ready to move forward,” said Tang.

“We are going to keep improving on our core competencies and development. With the “new normal”, post-Covid situation, we believe the market demand is recovering. Therefore we foresee there will be massive changes in managing brand colours and multichannel printing processes not just in offset, gravure or flexo, but in other printing arenas like the textile, decorative and wide format industrial printing segments too. We are looking forward to it,” Tang concluded.