The printing industry, especially for packaging, is growing in Cambodia and the region, participants at a trade event in Phnom Penh said on Monday.

“It has certainly developed, the demand is slowly rising,” Karen Prager, business unit manager at Rieckermann Cambodia, told the Post.

The Drupa exhibition is the biggest printing industry exhibition in the world, taking place every four years in Germany.

“For the first time we had a group of Cambodian customers joining us at the exhibition. It is a good sign for the future of the Cambodian printing industry,” Prager said.

John Riley from CoPac Company said commercial printing globally has changed because of the internet, but packaging is growing. “Because whenever you have any product that goes in a retail shop, for the most part it’s going to be in a package of some sort,” he said.

CoPac is a US-based printing company with international customers, for example from the garment industry.

Riley said packaging has seen a shift towards Southeast Asia.  He said the company’s customers produce goods such as garments, and the “garment industry can move from region to region or country to country because part of the driving force is the cost of labour”.

“Things are changing, globally,” he said. For many years, everything has been done in China, but recently there have been changes, with some product manufacturing being moved to Southeast Asia, he said.

“Our job is to produce the printing, the packaging close to wherever the customer is,” he said. “When they move what they’re manufacturing that means the packaging moves with it.”

Kol Vathana, managing director at So Peuv Express Printing Paper Supplies, a local company supplying the printing industry, said the printing business in Cambodia is growing.

“I think this is alongside with the development of the economy, the national economy,” he said, adding that also the living standards of Cambodians have been rising.

The event focussed on new technologies and developments in printing business shown during Drupa 2012 and the current market needs and trends in the printing industry.

To contact the reporter on this story: Anne Renzenbrink at [email protected]