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THE MEDIA
Hong Kong's geographical location as a natural centre for Southeast Asian trade, the relatively low company and salary taxation, modern equipment, good communications systems and reasonable wage rates have combined to influence not only some of the large Japanese printing companies to establish operations in the territory, but also has attracted printing work from many overseas countries with Australia, Britain and the United States as the major customers.
The most modern techniques are employed. Traditional hot metal typesetting and letter- press printing methods began to give way to new technology in the late 1960s, with all of the large companies, as well as many smaller ones, adopting cold composition and good quality four-colour process printing. Highly advanced colour separation scanners on the origination side and fully automated book-binding and finishing equipment further enhance the quality of local work.
Approximately 85,000 tonnes of printing paper is imported annually and although a portion is re-exported before processing, most of it is printed in Hong Kong.
A number of international publishing organisations, such as Heinemann Educational Books, Oxford University Press, McGraw-Hill Far Eastern Publishers and the International Publishing Corporation, have established offices or regional headquarters in Hong Kong. Publications they produce include editions of the Far-Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek and The Asian Wall Street Journal, together with the Asian editions of Time, Newsweek and 700,000 copies per month of Reader's Digest.
Although Hong Kong did not completely escape the world-wide recession that has hit the printing industry, the volume of overseas trade decreased only slightly compared with the previous year, and the majority of companies remained fairly busy.
Numerous international and local printing machinery and equipment suppliers, together with more than 200 advertising agencies, are now well-established in Hong Kong and provide the support services that are essential to an efficient printing and publishing industry.
Among the leaders in the field of computer-assisted photo-composition are the Hong Kong Government Printing Department and the South China Morning Post. During the year, the Government Printing Department purchased a fourth generation typesetting installation - the Monophoto Lasercomp Photosetter with Multiset forward system which is the first laser beam typesetting unit in Hong Kong. It has a capacity of 1,000 founts, each of 128 characters.