South East Asia Newspaper Group (SEANG) has bounded into its third year, celebrating its birthday with a huge conference – more than three times the size of last year’s – which opened in Jakarta yesterday (writes Peter Coleman).

Some 202 delegates, including representatives from newspaper sites in six countries and their suppliers – a total of 20 nationalities – are at the grand Sultan Hotel (a former Hilton) in the Indonesian capital. Their three-day learning-and-networking event opened on Monday with golf and a poolside party.

SEANG was created in 2008 when Conti-Air regional sales manager Stephan Peters shared with manroland South East Asia ‘king of service’ KS Ng, a vision of a vendor-agnostic technical organisation on the lines of Australia’s SWUG.

Two successful conferences have been held in Bangkok, but there is little disagreement that a turning point for the group was when Anthony Cheng got involved.
Cheng, who heads production at media giant Singapore Press Holdings and as such has spearheaded a massive multimillion-dollar upgrade of its two print plants, says he was ‘hijacked’ into the role of president last year.

His considerable influence is credited with boosting the number of vendor sponsors and thus facilitating the sudden growth of the group. But if many were press-ganged into their presence in Jakarta this week, none seem at all unhappy with the arrangement: SEANG delivers a close relationship with key technical management from some of the region’s top newspaper publishers, and despite the conference’s ‘no selling’ rule, that’s hardly bad for business.

Theme of this year’s conference is ‘Opportunities in a crisis’, but although the region’s press confronted a GFC-prompted turndown in 2009, its growth is still the envy of the rest of the world.

Speakers have reflected that optimistic scenario: Among them, Akhmed Junaidi of Indonesia’s ‘Jawa Pos’ (PT Temprina), told how his company weathered the financial storms of 1998 while maintaining its growth by buying lower-cost used presses and putting them into existing buildings.

Jimmy Oo of SPH explained how capacity freed by smaller production needs could be used creatively to produce added-value products – such as spadias, super-panoramas and translucent wrappers – and boost advertising revenue. SPH ad sales grew six per cent in the second quarter of 2010 and those for the third (due to be announced in October) are expected to show further growth.

Philippines delegate Vilma Julaton, who is a member of the SEANG committee, told how sites could avoid costs by including concern over accidental damage to plant and property in their health and safety policies. And how good environmental stewardship could benefit the bottom-line.

Vendor representatives, some of whom have travelled across the world to attend, have followed up with briefings on the further opportunities for building quality and productivity, and saving costs offered by their technologies.

Evening highlight was SEANG’s first plant visit, with a dinner lavishly hosted by the privately-owned publisher of Indonesian daily newspaper ‘Kompas’, magazine, website and radio station proprietor (and incidentally, owner of 102 bookshops) Gramedia.

The progamme continues today with more of the technical mix: Slated to speak this morning is Gaby van Deventer from pioneering Dutch newspaper printer Hoekstra Boom. A popular speaker at an earlier SWUG conference, he survived a near-death gang attack to build a career in print and take a leading role in Hoekstra’s development of its leading-edge Goss FPS-equipped plant.

Time has also been earmarked not only to discuss plans for SEANG’s future events, but for newspaper users to air problems and grievances with vendors. With Cheng leading the initiative, it should make for another interesting day.