1. Why Zhejiang's Printing Industry Begins With One Small City

Printing and recording-media reproduction is an industry with an awkward name and a wide reach. It covers publication printing for books, periodicals and newspapers; packaging and decorative printing for cartons, gift boxes and labels; typesetting, plate-making and binding of printed matter; and the reproduction of recording media such as discs and tapes. The customers and processes of these sub-categories differ greatly, and at the provincial level a single aggregate output figure easily masks the real divergence inside.

Zhejiang happens to be a good sample for observing this industry. By the framing of the Zhejiang Press and Publication Bureau's report on the printing industry, in 2023 the province had 13,658 printing enterprises, an industrial output value of 192.226 billion yuan, revenue of nearly 197.1 billion yuan, and around 310,000 employees, placing it firmly among the national leaders. But these ten thousand-plus firms are not spread evenly across Zhejiang: packaging and decorative printers alone number 9,801, publication printers 396, with the rest being other printed-matter, specialist and digital printers. Packaging printing overwhelmingly dominates by number, while book printing is highly concentrated. That is the first layer of Zhejiang's printing map.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute treats Zhejiang's printing industry as a regional sample not because its output leads the nation, but because it unpacks an industry usually treated as a lump into a deeply uneven yet interlocking structure: Longgang, a small city promoted from a township, carries almost single-handedly the volume of Zhejiang's printing industry, while a handful of leaders around Hangzhou, Ningbo and Shaoxing carry the quality of book and high-end packaging printing. This article endorses no investment judgement; it simply lays out the real landscape of each force and honestly notes their respective weaknesses.

2. Longgang: A City Promoted From a Township, Grown Into the China Printing City

To understand Zhejiang's printing industry, you cannot get around Longgang.

Longgang sits within Cangnan in Wenzhou. Once a township, it became in 2019 the country's first county-level city promoted directly from a township. As early as 2002 it was granted the title China Printing City by the China Printing Technology Association, later adding several other national titles centred on printing and packaging, such as China Gift City and a hub for desk and wall calendars. A small city that started with farmers moving into town and family workshops turned printing and packaging into its livelihood, which in itself is one of the most notable entries in Zhejiang's printing record.

Its scale rests on density. According to People's Daily Online and local Wenzhou reporting, as of 2023 Longgang held 894 enterprises with printing operation permits, an all-time high, of which more than 220 were above-scale, with over 20,000 employees and well over 100,000 in related employment. In the five years from the city's founding to 2023, the annual output of Longgang's printing and packaging industry grew from over 11 billion yuan to around 20 billion yuan, with the cluster's output averaging 16.7 percent annual growth over the most recent three years. Placed back within the provincial picture, Longgang alone contributes a sizeable share of Zhejiang's printing industry; it is no exaggeration to say it carries the volume.

Longgang's products are close to daily life: from the most common cartons, boxes, gift boxes and calendars to trademarks, hang tags, instruction sheets and all manner of packaging and decorative print, all connected to the great web of consumer goods, gifts and e-commerce logistics. It follows not a leader-driven path but a grassroots one, with thousands of small and medium printers clustered tightly together and fully supplied in chain, from plate-making, printing, die-cutting and binding to auxiliary materials and sales. The whole city is, in effect, one extended printing line.

3. Longgang's Weakness: The Old Grind Inside the Cluster Must Shift Gears

To see Longgang merely as a city with pretty numbers is to underestimate its difficulty.

The soft spot of the Longgang model lies precisely in its many-but-small make-up. Among the 800-plus licensed printers, a great many are small and medium firms of limited scale and homogeneous products, working on general packaging and printed matter with low barriers, weak bargaining power, and long mired in price wars and capacity churn. Local media have bluntly described Longgang's printing industry as once being deep in the mire of self-defeating competition, having piled up its volume on the old grind of an earlier generation of Zhejiang merchants, and now arriving at a junction where it must shift gears.

In recent years Longgang has clearly steered toward digital printing, green printing and high-quality development, proposing a move from printing city to printing power, guiding the industry from competing on quantity to competing on quality, design and digital capability. The expansion of above-scale firms, selection onto cultural-enterprise lists, and the building of industrial parks and public platforms are all paving the way for this shift. For a printing city built up out of family workshops, the hardest pass is how to lead 800-plus small and medium printers out of homogeneous price wars, so that the China Printing City title means not only large volume but also depth in design and craft.

4. Hangzhou and Book Printing: The Zhejiang Publishing United Group Pole

Longgang carries the volume of Zhejiang's printing industry, but for publication printing the lead is in Hangzhou.

Zhejiang Publishing United Group was founded in 2000 and is a large cultural enterprise group covering the full chain of publishing, printing, distribution and paper supply; in 2024 it recorded revenue of 13.362 billion yuan and total profit of 1.604 billion yuan, placing it in the first tier of regional publishing groups by overall scale. Its subsidiary Zhejiang Printing Group is a relatively large publication printer within the province, ranking among the top of national above-scale book-and-periodical printers by total assets, sales revenue, total profit and print volume, and it has repeatedly been listed among China's top hundred printing enterprises, the only book-and-periodical printer in Zhejiang to make the list.

The character of this pole is wholly different from Longgang's. Longgang competes on scale built from densely clustered small and medium printers, while this Hangzhou line competes on the systematic capability of a state-owned publishing group, with a stable supply of book and periodical publications, regulated capacity, and long-term orders tied to publishing and education needs. Its firms are few in number but heavy in single-unit weight, representing the end of Zhejiang's printing industry with higher added value and standardisation. In a landscape where the province's publication printers number only 396 and are highly concentrated at the top, the stability of this pole corresponds to the relatively counter-cyclical part of the whole industry.

5. Ningbo, Shaoxing and Wenzhou's Packaging Printing Leaders

If Longgang is an ocean of small and medium printers and Hangzhou a height of book printing, then the leaders that have truly grown to scale in Zhejiang's packaging printing are scattered around Ningbo, Shaoxing and Wenzhou.

This belt gathers a group of enterprises that have built scale in packaging printing and paper products. Shaoxing's Zhejiang Jingxing Paper is a papermaking and packaging firm centred on containerboard and corrugated paper; around Hangzhou and Ningbo there are paper-products makers such as Zhejiang Dashengda Packaging and Ningbo Asia Paper Tube and Carton; Wenzhou's Senlin Packaging Group went public around 2018, a circular papermaking-and-packaging enterprise linking waste-paper recycling, combined heat and power, ecological papermaking and green packaging into one. In addition, Zhejiang Changhai Packaging has long ranked near the front in flexible plastic packaging, and Ningbo's Guangbo Group, Zhejiang Mozhihua and Meinong Century have all earned the title of national model printing enterprise in printing and packaging.

The value of this link is that it catches both ends, reaching upstream to paper and packaging materials and downstream to brand packaging. Unlike Longgang's grassroots density and Hangzhou's book-printing regulation, it competes on the capability of scaled manufacturing and integrated supply, from papermaking and plate-making to finished packaging in one chain, able to supply steadily the packaging needs of large brands in food, beverages and daily goods. These leaders may not all rank among the national top, but they carry the minority force in Zhejiang's packaging printing that can stay bound to large customers over the long term and climb toward green and high-end directions.

6. Cangnan and Pingyang: A Niche Corner of Signs, Self-Adhesive Labels and Trademark Printing

Beyond Longgang's aura, the Cangnan and Pingyang area of Wenzhou also hides a finer corner: signs, self-adhesive labels and trademark printing.

Within Cangnan, places such as Qianku, Jinxiang and Longgang gather many small and medium firms specialising in signs, nameplates, self-adhesive labels, trademark hang tags and plastic-sheet trademarks, and the area also has firms whose main business is self-adhesive paper and stationery printing; the Tengjiao area of Pingyang has factories specialising in safety signs, traffic signs and nameplates. The products of this corner look fragmentary, yet they are the support that industrial goods, consumer goods and public facilities cannot do without: the labels on products, the nameplates on equipment, the signs on roads, all rest on this kind of niche printing.

It interweaves geographically with Longgang's general packaging printing, with each having its own emphasis in process, together giving depth to this printing belt in Wenzhou. Singling it out is meant to show that the real landscape of Zhejiang's printing industry is not simply Longgang plus a few leaders; beyond the main line are scattered a great many niche factories tied to specific uses, each with its own know-how. By number they flow into the provincial pool of more than 9,800 packaging and decorative printers, yet each does a somewhat different kind of work.

For sales teams supplying upstream to printing and recording-media reproduction enterprises, whether selling coated paper, ivory board, ink, plate material, self-adhesive base stock, or printing presses, die-cutters and binding equipment, to reach Zhejiang's printing and packaging factory customers in bulk, you can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter precisely by both region and industry the directory of Zhejiang printing and recording-media reproduction factories and the contacts of their decision-makers, turning upstream sales customer development from door-to-door inquiry into navigation by map.

7. The Institute's Judgement: Volume Is Already Large Enough; the Next Leg Is About Depth

Gathering the several forces together, Zhejiang's printing and recording-media reproduction industry takes a shape of enormous volume and layered quality: Wenzhou's Longgang, grown from the China Printing City, with 894 licensed printers, 220-plus above-scale and around 20 billion yuan in cluster output, carries almost single-handedly the volume of the province's printing industry, a sample of grassroots-dense general printing tied to consumption and e-commerce; Hangzhou's Zhejiang Printing Group, under Zhejiang Publishing United Group, is the only book-and-periodical printer in the province on China's top-hundred list, carrying the systematic, counter-cyclical pole of book printing; the leaders around Ningbo, Shaoxing and Wenzhou, such as Jingxing Paper, Dashengda, Senlin Packaging and Changhai Packaging, carry scaled, integrated packaging printing; and the sign and self-adhesive clusters of Cangnan and Pingyang add a niche corner beyond the main line. The provincial pool of more than 13,000 printers and nearly 200 billion yuan of output is stitched together this way, out of forces of utterly different character.

Its risks divide cleanly too. Longgang, the main line of volume, is at base homogeneous general printing, with firms many and small, thin and scattered in profit; under rising raw-material prices, tightening environmental rules and the shock of digitisation, this low-barrier dense form bears the most pressure, and whether it can turn from price wars toward design and digital printing is its question of life and death. Hangzhou's book printing, though regulated and stable, is pulled by total publishing volume and paper costs, with limited room to grow. The packaging-printing leaders are headed in the right direction but depend heavily on downstream consumer-goods conditions and large-customer orders. And the niche small firms of Cangnan and Pingyang are more easily swept up by blanket industrial policy and environmental clean-ups. Each has its own soft spot, hard to sum in one line.

The view of the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute is this: the point of Zhejiang's printing industry is no longer whether total volume can climb another step, for with more than ten thousand firms and nearly 200 billion yuan of output, volume is already large enough. The real question is whether this industry, with small and medium printers as its absolute majority, can grow depth on top of volume. Whether Longgang can lead its 800-plus small and medium printers out of the grind toward design and green printing, whether the book and packaging leaders can move toward higher added value while staying steady, whether the niche clusters can hold their own know-how under the pressure of environmental rules and transition, these questions have no single answer, yet together they decide whether Zhejiang's printing industry can move from one city carrying volume and a few leaders carrying quality toward a next leg where both volume and quality stand up to scrutiny. In a vast industry covered over by its name, the real story often hides in the folds where volume and quality split apart.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory and industrial data of Zhejiang printing and recording-media reproduction factories)
  • Zhejiang Press and Publication Bureau, report on the printing industry: 2023 provincial printing enterprise count, industrial output value, revenue, profit and employment, and the firm counts of packaging-decorative, publication and other sub-categories
  • People's Daily Online Zhejiang channel: Longgang China Printing City licensed printer count, above-scale firm count, employment and related employment, and the industry's annual output and recent three-year growth
  • Wenzhou Municipal Government website and World Zhejiang Merchants Net: reporting on Longgang's printing transition, above-scale firm expansion and the gear-shift out of self-defeating competition
  • China Printing Technology Association: Longgang's 2002 award of the China Printing City title
  • Public materials on Zhejiang Publishing United Group and disclosures of Zhejiang Publishing & Media: the group's founding year, revenue and profit scale, and full-chain layout
  • Public materials on Zhejiang Printing Group: the only book-and-periodical printer in the province on China's top-hundred printing list, and national ranking on key book-printing indicators
  • Public disclosures and corporate website of Senlin Packaging Group: listing status and circular papermaking-and-packaging positioning
  • Public industry reporting: Jingxing Paper, Dashengda, Changhai Packaging, Guangbo Group, Mozhihua, Meinong Century and other Zhejiang printing and packaging leaders, and the list of national model printing enterprises
  • Public enterprise directories and Wenzhou local materials: sign, self-adhesive label and trademark printing clusters in Cangnan's Qianku, Jinxiang and Longgang and Pingyang's Tengjiao