Industry Report
Chinese OEMs have made significant steps forward in recent years when it comes to manufacturing components for the digital print industry
• International business development
The other way around, you can witness a lot of foreign customers visiting Chinese factories for various business meetings and tech trainings. The Chinese OEMs seem to have been intentional in building their own partner networks and establishing clear rules across their distribution channels. Many factories for Chinese digital printing equipment engage in digital marketing worldwide and support educational initiatives to promote their developments.
• Response times and expertise of pre-sales and after-sales Most importantly, the qualifications of sales teams, the ‘fast and furious’ response of technical support teams, and the excellent proficiency of English of the younger generation that work for the OEMs make it much easier for the partners to be onboarded in the distribution networks to deliver solutions to the global markets.
• Fast adapting for tech innovations
Chinese OEMs seem to be ahead of their western competitors on the R&D work leveraging the advancements of the latest print heads released to the market in 2018 to 2021. A lot of recently introduced garment printers are built up on the electronic boards developed by Chinese tech companies which gives China once step ahead in the innovations’ development for the market.
DTF continues to complement DTG penetrating into industrial sector
Direct to film printing entered the industry in 2020 by a storm attracting a lot of garment decorators with a cheap entrance ticket: prices of machinery affordable for entry-level businesses and very low costs of printing artworks on the films. Whereas there were many factors that have rapidly driven DTF decoration method forward, i.e. the access to new type of print heads for many OEMs, boosting e-commerce models in the times of the pandemic, China’s strong domestic supply chain to export DTF solutions, and global RIP software companies picking up the trend to push the DTF forward, the garment decorators started to approach the onboarding for this printing method in a more responsible way, when quality and sustainability are at stake. The ability to have digital prints heat transferred to virtually
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any type of fabrics, including nylon and polyester, has given a lot of room for creativity of many performance and sportswear manufacturers. As the result, the manufacturers are looking for solutions that will bring DTF to the industrial scale, streamline the workflow and ensure consistency across thousands of prints with many different designs. It is inevitable that the world-known DTG OEMs will jump in and introduce their own machines, production workflows and even concepts that will allow DTF to migrate into a more mature technology, allowing it to complement effectively DTG and even conventional screen printing.
Hybrid solutions arise to foster print complexity The word hybrid is widely recognised to describe multiple decoration methods being used together for the benefit of the print. It is sometimes used to point out that a single commercial digital printing unit can handle both decoration methods (i.e. DTG and DTF) – after all, it is the same print head using the same inkset to deliver the print on different substrates. It is also often used to indicate a combination of different methods – utilising several pieces of different equipment attached to each other, or an all-in-one solution – to get the printing job done at a lower cost than any of these methods can provide when being solely used. Regardless of a particular situation when the hybrid approach is applied, it enables garment decorators to do a lot of complex printing works of rich, attractive prints with varieties of different colours, handfeels and special effects. For instance, doing a discharge via the screen, printing the colour layer digitally on top and highlighting white spots can result in an amazing digital full-colour print with no handfeel. By all means the decorators will seek new ways how to adopt these hybrid solutions in their production premises and run very sophisticated printing jobs. It is exciting to see how digitalisation and sustainability empowered by the experience of conventional decoration methods, the access to rapidly developing print head technologies, and the AI assistance in artwork creation and design will contribute to the fast evolution of the industry. No doubt 2023 will open up a lot of new opportunities for both equipment and software manufacturers and garment decorators across different markets in many parts of the world.
March 2023 | 49 |
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