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The chaos of print shows in India

Vernacular exhibitions: starting again from the grass roots
January 25, 2010 | By Naresh Khanna

The era of big exhibitions is over. Perhaps with the exception of drupa in Dusseldorf and China Print in Beijing, we do not see any comprehensive international exhibition on the horizon that can be really successful. There will be specialised and niche shows that may continue to grow but in the main, even these will have to encompass new segments to fill their current floor space. Nevertheless it is unlikely that they will match their past visitor numbers. Recovery or no recovery.

Vijaya Raj of CMYK India at Printech 2009, Mumbai

In this context, in the chaos of the emerging economy of India, growing again at 7.75 per cent and with states and regions that are each larger than 95 per cent of the countries on earth, there is a new homespun dynamic that addresses ordinary and small printers. This is the vernacular show, with a strong component of national and local manufacturers in a region, such as the Printech in Mumbai which opened on 18 December and closed on 21 December. With reasonable rates for exhibitors, and unpaid association organisers who have put on road shows in smaller Western Indian cities and across the country, this is a hard working show.

The Printech show had 72 fully paid and an additional fifteen barter deal stands -- mostly of Indian manufacturers of small presses, wide format inkjet printers, automated screen printing and quite a lot of converting and postpress equipment ranging from coaters and die-cutters to envelope making and perfect binding machines. A local manufacturer of creasing and perforation machines who priced his machine at Rs. 25,000 booked seventy orders by the third day of the show.

There was an interesting range of consumables on display especially paper, ink, plates and chemicals. There were international brands present – right from Adobe that had its own large stand to Taiyo and Iwasaki represented by their dealers, to ink manufacturers from Dubai and Mumbai itself. TechNova attempted to conduct grass roots education at its Touch centre in the middle of the show floor but the attendance did not justify their valiant effort. TechNova’s staff felt that the parade of shows of shows across the year had finally exhausted visitors.

Printech was a modest show but it occupied more paid floor space (albeit at much lower rates) than a recent international show held at the same site. As far as visitors, the first day was thin, but the second and third days were robust and the total unique visitor count according to our own estimate reached about 9,000.

The show will barely break-even in spite of the hard work by the organisers. Profits will go to the printing college supported by the Mumbai Mudrak Sangh in Panvel. Profit or no profit, here is an association that has spent some money on print education.What will the vernacular exhibitions lead to? It is clear that the cost and the number of exhibitions need to come down and that even the large manufacturers cannot afford to take part in shows everywhere let alone show running machines in four-day shows in semi-permanent spaces that have neither proper foundations nor effective air conditioning.

The shows in India that work hard and keep improving will soon be better value platforms than international shows. Especially if the organisers — mainly IPAMA (the Indian manufacturers’ association) and the various factions of the AIFMP (the printers’ association) overcome their fratricidal politics. There is also no need for separate shows organised by paper, ink, packaging and newspaper associations.

The extensive and high quality Indian equipment and consumable manufacturers need value for money footfalls in a coherent and well-organised show just once every four years. Smaller exhibitions that rotate regionally on an annual basis, can be justified by the need to reach the huge mass of ordinary and smaller printers who will come to exhibitions by trains and buses just for the day.

The chaos and lack of leadership and foresight in our industry present tempting opportunities to “professional” and “international” organisers but they will be surprised as a new generation of Indian printers and manufacturers totally changes this chaos into purpose. This will happen sooner than later.