Current situation and development trend of the hot

The current situation and development trend of cigarette packet printing market (I)

I. Analysis of production equipment and capacity of cigarette packet printing enterprises nationwide

cigarette packet printing because of its product characteristics: large output, many spot colors and large background colors, the printing equipment mostly adopts gravure printing machines. Rotogravure printing machine has the characteristics of high efficiency and thick ink color, and has significant advantages in cigarette bag printing with tens of millions of pieces at any time. Therefore, the early cigarette bag printing was mainly printed by gravure printing machine. Most gravure printing machines are imported, and there are also a few brands: Bobst, Komori Chambon, ceruttl, comprint, ATN, Fuji, Polytech and rotomec. The domestic installed capacity of Komori Chambon is about 240 color groups, while the domestic installed capacity of Bobst, ceruttl and Jinyin is close to or more than 200 color groups, and the other brands are about 20 ~ 40 color groups respectively. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 200 printing enterprises focusing on cigarette packs in China, and most of them have gravure printing production lines. There are more than 50 6-8 color gravure printing lines in Yunnan alone. Due to the relatively large profits of cigarette package printing in the early years, a large number of printing enterprises have set foot in the cigarette package printing industry, especially those in Guangdong and Shenzhen. As a result, the competition for cigarette package printing has become increasingly fierce. As a result, the cigarette package design and printing process have become more and more complex, and the materials used have become more and more exquisite. Therefore, gravure printing, offset printing, flexo printing, silk screen printing, UV printing, UV glazing, holographic hot stamping Laser aluminum foil paper and other technologies have been launched one after another. Cigarette boxes printed by the combination of twoorthree printing technologies can be seen everywhere. Cigarette boxes combined with a variety of printing technologies are not new, and even the engraving gravure used for printing RMB is also used in cigarette box printing. For a time, exquisite cigarette bag products, such as the water of the Yangtze River, are constantly emerging, with its complex technology and advanced technology, which can be called the world leader. In this situation, the original high-speed rotary gravure printing machine is no longer suitable for the requirements of combined printing of cigarette packets in various ways, and its flexibility is greatly limited. At this time, the domestic monochrome gravure printing machine with good quality and low price took advantage of the trend and occupied the best time, place and people under the general situation of printing cigarette packs with a variety of technology combinations. Its main manufacturers, Beijing zhenhenri Printing Machinery Co., Ltd., Shanghai Ziming Machinery Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Hairun printing starting oil pump Machinery Co., Ltd., have seen a booming sales of single concave machines in the past two years. The powerful cigarette bag printing enterprises have spared no expense to buy the combined printing production line, such as the Gallas combined printing production line, which has appeared in the north and south of China. According to statistics, 42 jieras production lines have been sold in China. Although in recent years, in line with the guiding ideology that fat and water do not flow out of the field and make money for themselves, most cigarette factories have established compact printing enterprises by means of investment, joint venture, joint venture, employee equity, etc., and have closed their cigarette bag printing within the walls of these printing enterprises. But such cigarette bag printing enterprises are not at ease. The cigarette bag enterprises outside the fence are always greedy to peep at the movements inside the fence, constantly looking for opportunities to encroach on the territory of the printing enterprises inside the fence by adopting technological innovation and various public relations means. Forced by this dangerous situation, the enterprises within the fence are also constantly gnashing their teeth and desperately adding new equipment and new processes, constantly preventing the attack of other enterprises. In the face of such a cruel reality, disorderly competition is becoming more and more intense, resulting in an increasing scale of investment. What is more terrifying is that the worrying over investment has exposed the tip of the iceberg and is beginning to show signs. As mentioned above, there are 50 gravure printing production lines in Yunnan Province, while Yunnan Province has only 18 billion cigarette packs per year. According to the current production capacity of gravure printing machines, about 30 production lines are enough to complete. Even so, the trend of purchasing new production lines in Yunnan has not stopped. Looking at Yunnan and knowing the whole country, how far can it be from the day when the price and profit of cigarette packet printing avalanche

II. The current printing technology characteristics of cigarette packs in China

1. The development of single gravure printing to offset printing and combination printing

offset printing has always occupied an absolute dominant position in the field of publishing and commercial printing. In particular, high-end prints such as picture books can only be completed by offset printing. This is because the offset press has developed to today, and the existence of these technical problems has made China's plastic machinery industry unable to meet foreign plastic machinery as soon as possible. The level of plastic machinery has been very mature, and it has incomparable advantages in image detail reproduction in other printing methods. Compared with gravure printing, offset printing plate making has the remarkable characteristics of short cycle and low cost. At present, when cigarette factories frequently change cigarette bag design, constantly launch new products, and the sales volume of new products is small, offset printing machines show high flexibility, which is the main reason why offset printing accounts for an increasing proportion in cigarette bag printing in recent years. Especially in the field of printing in China, offset printing has been very popular, accounting for the largest proportion in all kinds of printing methods. It is the most important printing method in the field of publishing and packaging printing in China. Therefore, in China, the installed capacity of offset printing machine is the largest, with the best hardware environment and software conditions. Heidelberg, Manroland, gaobao, Komori, Mitsubishi and Akiyama, the six major international suppliers of offset printing machines, have increased their sales in China in recent years. Most of the introduced sheet fed offset printing machines are used for packaging and printing. Although many large and medium-sized cigarette package printing enterprises have purchased web gravure printing machines or flexographic printing machines, they all take offset printing as one of their main businesses, or for printing small and medium-sized cigarette package products, or for printing packaging products in other sectors of society (such as cigarette boxes, cosmetic boxes, medicine boxes, etc.). However, in recent years, with the intensification of competition in the tobacco industry and the continuous improvement of cigarette box design, a single offset printing has been unable to meet the requirements of exquisite cigarette bags, so the technology of printing rigid cigarette bags by combination of offset printing, gravure printing, silk, flexo printing and so on quietly rose, and became popular in the north of the Yangtze River Delta overnight. The result of combined printing has pushed the grade of cigarette packs to an unprecedented level. At the same time, it also gives full play to the characteristics of several printing methods, learning from each other's strong points to complement each other's weak points, leading the way. Offset printing is used to print plus images and gradient patterns. Taking advantage of the thick ink layer and stable ink color of gravure printing, large-area field and spot colors, gold silver, pearlescent colors and various imitation metal etching inks are printed. If you need special finishing effect, you can also add silk printing process, such as frosting, ice flower, crystal, wrinkles, etc. Therefore, the combination of offset printing, gravure printing and silk screen printing has brought unprecedented strong artistic visual effects to cigarette packs. Coupled with the post-processing technology: Gold sweeping, UV local glazing, bronzing, bulging, etc., it makes the cigarette bag even more beautiful and amazing

2. the materials used are becoming more and more high-grade

because the four or five types of cigarette factories are unprofitable, how to promote the first and second types of cigarettes to the market, create brands and open sales has been the dream of all cigarette factories in recent years. As the soft pack "Zhonghua" is the number one representative of high-end cigarettes in China, its elegant packaging design of typical Chinese cigarettes has become the object of imitation by cigarette factories. As a result, when launching their own top-grade cigarettes, cigarette factories mostly adopt soft packaging design, and the materials used are almost all laser holographic aluminum foil paper, which is undoubtedly the highest price among all papers. For example, the blue soft bag lotus king, treasure Nanjing, treasure Baisha, treasure jiaozi, sunshine jiaozi, blue soft bag Baxi, century boutique lotus king, hard box lotus king, Honghe V 8, Guiyan, special alcohol gold medal Yunyan, etc. all use plain laser aluminum foil. The outer packaging is so exquisite, and the interior is not backward. Many tipping papers used in these cigarettes are bronzed. All these make the cost of packaging and printing increase unprecedentedly. Of course, the price of these cigarettes is also expensive, ranging from 20 to 80 yuan/box, or even higher

3. There are more and more patterns in the post-processing process of cigarette boxes, and the operation is more and more complex

in addition to the printing process becoming more and more complex and the materials becoming more and more exquisite, the post-processing process is also unwilling to be lonely, with more and more patterns and more complex operations

①. Gold sweeping

a process between bronzing and gold printing, which is characterized by high speed and low cost, and can achieve ideal results regardless of the thickness and area of the text. Gold powder also has a variety of colors, such as gold, silver, red gold, red copper, green, brown, lemon, malachite blue, and so on. It also has different particle sizes, showing different visual effects to avoid the abnormal movement of the company's stock price. In foreign countries, there is also a popular gold powder with diamond like effect. This gold powder has four particle sizes and 10 colors, which can make the whole picture and text show a group of diamond patterns under the light, and reflect the unique effect of colorful light. Representative cigarette bag: Red 'Huangshan'

②. Holographic hot stamping

laser holograms are made based on the principle of laser interference and the method of spatial frequency coding. Laser holograms have been used in the field of anti-counterfeiting since the 1980s because of their magnificent colors, obvious layers, vivid images, variable optical transformation effects, and high information and technology content. The latest OVD technology has been significantly different from the widely used hologram hologram, and some holograms have machine recognition functions. The mechanism of holographic bronzing is to heat and melt the hot melt adhesive layer and separation layer on the holographic hot stamping material through the heated hot stamping die on the hot stamping equipment. Under a certain pressure, the holographic grating stripes of the information layer of the hot stamping material are separated from the pet substrate, so that the aluminum foil information layer and the hot stamping surface are bonded and integrated to achieve a perfect combination

there are three types of holographic hot stamping: A. random hot stamping of ordinary holograms; B。 Special version hologram random ironing; C. Special hologram positioning iron. The third kind of special hologram positioning iron has appeared frequently on high-end cigarette packs in the past two years. It refers to the accurate hot stamping of the hologram of a specific part of the holographic anti-counterfeiting hot stamping anodized onto the specific position of the cigarette bag through photoelectric recognition on the hot stamping equipment. Hologram positioning ironing technology is very difficult, which requires not only printing plants to be equipped with high-performance and high-precision special positioning ironing equipment, but also high-quality special positioning ironing anodized aluminum. The production process should also be strictly controlled to produce qualified cigarette packaging products. Due to the high anti-counterfeiting performance of positioning hot stamping marks, they are used in banknotes, important certificates and other occasions. Representative cigarette packs: the best "Yunyan" and "Lotus king"

③ soft paper embossing and positioning ironing

due to the popular soft packaging form of high-end cigarettes, the gorgeous post-processing technology originally mature on white cardboard has also been transferred to soft paper. Yunnan Qiaotong packaging and Printing Co., Ltd. was the first to try in this area and achieved great success. This process completes bronzing and embossing in one process. The product has the characteristics of full bronzing, fine graphics and texts, beautiful appearance, and no embossing and skewing. However, this process is technically difficult, and the requirements for the accuracy of hot stamping plate, holographic film and hot stamping machine are particularly high, and all operation indicators must be very strict. Because of this, it is difficult to be imitated and has a high degree of anti-counterfeiting, representing cigarette packs: "Fu" and Huize "Little Panda"

④. Ironing before printing process

in order to highlight the specific patterns and logos on cigarette packets, some printing has been carried out in recent years