German press makers check out opportunities in Myanmar, Sri Lanka

Press and postpress makers in the German VDMA engineering association have been casting an eye over Asian markets including Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

A week-long conference tour ended in Rangoon last week after visits to Laos and Cambodia. Earlier, a VDAM group has also visited Sri Lanka.

Managing director of VDMA’s printing and paper technology association Markus Heering, the Managing Director of the VDMA Printing and Paper Technology Association says Myanmar is an interesting growth market with “huge potential for development”.

“Myanmar is in the process of overcoming its decades of economic backwardness at high speed,” he says. And he adds that German printing machinery makers need to “nail their colours on the mast” very early to open up the market.

Dr Heering sees growth for print products in Myanmar from print media and packaging. “During the military junta years, the small number of media that existed was state-owned. All publications were censored. Censorship has been abolished now, and since April 2013 private publishers are also allowed to publish newspapers and magazines.”

Eight newspapers were being published within the first month, and many other publications have followed, meeting with “high demand”.

Despite its farming-dominated economy – accounting for 35 per cent of GDP and occupying two thirds of its 60 million inhabitants – Myanmar has a comparatively high level of education and illiteracy rate of only eight per cent, according to UN estimates.

Press makers are alert to the opportunities of a country in which agricultural products are seldom packed, and Heering says overseas companies already plan investments running into billions of dollars. KBA Asia sales manager Rex Teng says that while conditions previously barred cultivation of the market, “it is now important to get our foot into the door quickly”.

German companies exported printing technology worth 20 million Euros ($27.4 million) to Myanmar last year, with Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia accounting for only 15 per cent of the southeast Asia total of 162 million Euros, itself a very small share of Germany’s 4.8 billion Euros of print technology exports.

Heering says that while the markets in Laos and Cambodia are smaller, opening them up is important to assessing the entire region better. Despite a six per cent annual growth rate in Cambodia over the last ten years, 30 per cent of the population still fall under the poverty line, and conditions in Laos are similar.

But Heering says the one-day conferences in Vientiane and Phnom Penh were as successful as that in Rangoon: “We have reached our goal and aroused some interest,” says Kolbus regional sales manager Fred Spangel. “With this start, we have prepared the ground for our marketing activities in the future.”

And while the bookbinding machine maker does not expect to bring its high speed machines to these markets immediately, it does see an opportunity for smaller ones. “This doesn’t make this market less interesting,” he says.

VDMA has also been looking at Sri Lanka, where a PrintPromotion seminar for specialist teachers aimed at boosting the quality of printed products was held in September.

Heering says the three-day Colombo course, attended by more than 20 teachers, was a big success. “It showed us that it makes sense to go into smaller markets as well," he says. "What good is our technological leadership if the customers and users don’t have sufficient trained staff to fully benefit from it."

He says Sri Lanka’s market for printing technology was worth 10.5 million Euros in 2012, down from 18.5 million Euros the previous year… but most are used machines. “The higher the demand for quality, the higher will be the potential of the market in Sri Lanka for new machines from Germany as well,” Heering says.

Pictured: Participants in the Colombo seminar