The printing industry

The print industry is globally one of the biggest industries, larger than the music industry or the video game industry.  It is in general in a slight decline in North-America, Europe and Japan, but growing elsewhere.

This page describes

• the different types of printing companies
• the largest printing companies
• the biggest print site in the world
• additional sources of information

Types of printing companies

Printing companies can be categorized based on the type of customers they serve, the types of jobs they print and the equipment they use. The printing market is often split into 4 segments:

Commercial printers

This is the largest market segment. Commercial printers typically print a wide range of products, from stationery to brochures and magazines. They use a mix of machines, typically including offset and digital presses.

Most commercial printers work for a wide range of customers:

• Private persons
• SOHO (small office, home office)
• SME (small and medium enterprises)
• Government & large enterprises

Some companies focus on specific markets, such as:

• Quick printers – printing a variety of small jobs in small run lengths for walk-in customers and local businesses. Copy shops are one type of quick printers.
• Forms printers
• Wide format printers – printing posters, banners, point-of-displays and other large jobs on paper, canvas, textiles and other substrates. This can be done using offset, screen printing and increasingly large format digital inkjet presses.
• Direct mail printers
• Security printing – The segment of the printing industry that handles printing banknotes, passports, identity documents, driver’s licenses, vouchers, lottery tickets but also packages for luxury or pharmaceutical products.

Packaging printers

Packaging printers have specialized in printing all kinds of packaging such as boxes, cartons, bags, cans, tags and labels. Packaging printers mostly use offset, flexo or digital presses.

Publication printing

These companies focus uniquely on printing publications: newspapers, books, periodicals such as magazines or directories such as the yellow pages. Most printers have specialized in just one type of publication, such as newspapers. They usually target the high volume work in their the market, with general commercial printers also doing their share of books and magazines.

In-plants

An in-plant is a printing facility that is part of a company or institution. It typically only produces print for its own employer, although sometimes excess capacity is used for commercial printing activities. Typical examples of in-plants are the print center of a university, the print department of a ministry or the print division of banks.

Printing companies do not necessarily fit into one category. Newspaper printing plants also try to get a piece of the commercial printing market, some commercial printers also do packaging work, etc. Not included in the above list is industrial printing – those are printing processes that are an integral part of the manufacturing process of some product, such as printing on ceramics or floor tiles.

There are additional industry sectors that are closely related to the above sectors. These include publishers, prepress services and trade binding.

Source: https://www.prepressure.com/printing/industry