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Screen printing, Thai style
Thailand holds its royalty in high esteem
In recent months I have travelled the world working with a range of printers and printing companies. East, west, north, south the problems are the same. Low margins, competition and the environment. There are some advantages as printers in some of the more welcoming nations provide excellent cultural exchanges, as can be seen on this page, where the new PDS Consulting representative for Asia is seen demonstrating our new company uniform. Notice the wool swatches for testing light fastness of colours and the excellent textile printing.
One of the countries included in my itinerary was Thailand. The first thing you notice when you arrive in this wonderful country is the roadside advertising, vast scaffolding structures with banners up to 50m long: some 100m.
The next thing you notice are the massive shrines to the Thai Royal family. This is a country that holds its royalty in high esteem. Most public places, every home, every shop and many websites have images of the Royal Family past and present.
This is a country that believes in using the printed image at every opportunity. I was in Thailand presenting seminars at the Fespa Asian Summit and was fortunate to be a guest of the Thai Screen Printing & Graphic Imaging Association (TSGA) whose friendship and hospitality was a joy. Amongst their number was Chalermchai Poomnak who invited me to visit his company Scan Printworks. This was a real eye opener.
This is a company specialising in large format screen printing. To give an idea of its output the stencil shown below was not its largest.
One of the jobs Scan Printworks was producing while I was on site was a 10,000-off run of banners. They use single colour semi-automatic machines in tandem with large jet dryers. Yes, solvent based inks with ambient temperatures over 40°C with a relative humidity sometimes up to 90 per cent. This is like screen printing in a greenhouse. How they managed under these circumstances is amazing.
You may get the impression from what I have written so far that this company was unsophisticated. Far from it, its CST direct to screen imaging device was the first in Asia and the automatic coater simply the largest I have ever seen. It was so big that they had to dig a hole to fit it under the roof.
The driving force behind this company employing over 150 staff was Chalermchai Poomnak and his wife. Chalermchai is an artist, a visionary and a shrewd business man who located his plant one and a half hours outside Bangkok where the air is clean and overheads reduced. Chalermchai has wide format digital printers but he considers the quality is inferior and prices he can get for the work prohibitively low. In Thailand, digital printing is considered a low cost, low quality process and inks are dirt cheap.
One of the biggest concerns that every printer and businessman I met had was the ‘China effect'. Insanely low prices were challenging even the immensely innovative Thai economy. On the local CNN channel a Chinese businessman was complaining his manufacturing costs in China were too high and he had to move to Vietnam and Cambodia for cheaper labour. Is the world going completely mad, where is the end of this urge to reduce production costs with anthropomorphic ants.
Chalermchai sees China as an opportunity and he has used his design skills and print expertise to supply decorated rubber tyres to the Chinese cycle industry. He screen prints specialised transfers for rubber that are moulded into tyres as they are produced. His minimum order for tyres is 4,000: now that is innovation.
Not satisfied with running his successful company, Chalermchai has designed and built his own house and gardens in the grounds of the factory. He has used traditional materials, traditional design concepts and produced an exquisite house and garden.
In Thailand screen printers have adopted digital printing but worked on making screen printing an even more effective process, everything we in the West should be doing. For them the monolithic Chinese economy is on their doorstep, yet they compete and succeed. Print company owners have a lifestyle that most of us can only dream about. They don't fight wars, don't want to take over the world, have an interesting political system and a revered Head of State. In a very hot climate they certainly know how to chill out.
So how do they do it? They work their socks off and aim to continuously improve every aspect of their business. Their secret ingredient is that each company is a team that pulls together and individual companies talk to each other, work together and share ideas. When they stop working they relaaaax.
peter.kiddell@pdsconsulting.co.uk
