THE MEDIA
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Hong Kong is the base of South-east Asian operations for many international radio and television networks, newspapers and magazines. International news agencies represented include Reuters, Associated Press of America, United Press International, Agence France Presse, Kyodo and Jiji Press.
Printing and Publishing
Hong Kong is an important printing centre that handles work from many parts of the world – particularly from Australia, Britain and the United States. Australians are said to read more books per head than any other nation, and about half of all the books published in Australia are now printed in Hong Kong.
The main attraction is that top-quality printing is available at substantial savings over other places, and excellent distribution and communication facilities are readily available. In 1977, exports of printed matter amounted to some $246 million, com- pared with $99 million in 1971.
There are some 1,200 printing firms and about a quarter of them are responsible for the bulk of production. They run highly-efficient offset printing works operating with machinery imported mainly from West Germany and Japan. Many specialise in printing books, glossy magazines, textbooks, calendars and diaries; others con- centrate on wrappings and industrial packaging. The standard of offset printing is high, with printing and illustrative production techniques comparing favourably with those of the world's leading printing nations. Electronic colour-engraving machines are widely used and colour separation technique is good. Two and four-colour print- ing machines are widely used and leading printers introduced eight-colour rotary and web-offset machines as early as 1962. During the first seven months of 1977, Hong Kong used 35,229 tonnes of newsprint valued at $59,784,132.
The other 75 per cent of printing firms use the letter-press method and generally produce small-scale printing, such as letterheads, posters, wrappers and some textbooks.
Since the 1960s, many overseas publishers have set up offices or regional head- quarters in Hong Kong. Educational book publishers who have done so include Heinemann Educational Books, the Oxford University Press, McGraw-Hill Far Eastern Publishers, and IPC of London, which has set up regional headquarters to handle the interests of its subsidiaries. The Asian editions of Time, Newsweek, and more than half a million copies a month of Reader's Digest are printed in Hong Kong.
Television
Hong Kong has three commercial wireless television stations - Television Broadcasts, Rediffusion Television and Commercial Television. They are usually referred to as TVB, RTV and CTV. TVB and RTV operate both Chinese language and English language services, while CTV operates a single Chinese language service.
The UHF, 625-line PAL colour system is standard and the three stations maintain well-equipped studio and office complexes using the latest production and trans- mission facilities and techniques. Virtually all transmissions are in colour.
Each day, the stations broadcast a total of about 65 hours of programmes to an estimated 3.2 million viewers. Some 90 per cent of Hong Kong homes have televi- sion sets, of which 48 per cent are colour.