The Return of an Imaging Empire
S
itting in the boardroom at Komori’s Tsukuba plant,
the world’s most modern sheetfed press manufacturing facility, an hour outside of Tokyo, Akira Sato slides a blue-and-yellow booklet across the table – “Take a look at this.” A lion emblem in the upper right hand corner
highlights Leo Paper Group: Dedicated to Excellence. In the middle of the cover, spot-gloss diamonds glisten and appear to drip like solid dew from sunflower leaves. “Their water is not so good for printing and the ink not always the best quality, but some manufacturers are doing work like this.”
Leo Paper is the Chinese printing monster living in the dark closets of North American printers. With Phase IV of its Heshan City Main Factory now complete, Leo is running between 70 and 80 sheetfed presses, most employing four units, others with eight plus coater – primarily supplied by Komori, which has a large 20 percent market share in China. “The biggest influence is on the United States, mainly the West Coast. We have a customer there and when we ask them about buying a new press, they say, ‘Sorry, I am losing 50 percent of my work to the Chinese market,’” explains Sato, sales and marketing manager for Komori’s Overseas Sales Group. “They do not know how they are going to make investments and are instead thinking about shutting down.”
Cheap labour in China allows Leo Paper (aptly described in its self-promotion booklet as a producer of paper products) to make huge printing technology investments – translating into more than 8,500 pieces of equipment across its platform. Self-described as The Boundaryless Printer, Leo employs 48 people in touch-point operations in New York, Seattle, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Even its 200-person Hong Kong headquarters cannot hide this company’s Chinese manufacturing roots. The Heshan City facility (in Guangxi Province bordering Vietnam) employs more than 14,500 factory workers who live in mammoth dormitories painted with so much company blue and yellow that the delivery trucks, guard post and a brick wall form an eerie village. Leo Paper has also funded the construction of a local bridge and a high school for 800 students. Referred to as Leonians, these workers are the power of China’s communist heart and the great fear of North American printers watching this odd notion of capitalism redefine manufacturing.
Read the full story in the January 2007 edition of PrintAction |
