Features

Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) this year have hit demand for printers in Lebanon, which has long been the printing hub of the region. Lebanese printers canvassed privately for Print Week MEA report that the upheavals have seen demand from Egypt and Syria decline, while transportation has been marginally affected from Lebanon due to the situation in neighbouring Syria.

Lebanon is a good yardstick of intra-regional trends because books and publications accounted for 20% of the country's total exports in 2010, the highest such percentage in the world. As an old Arabic saying goes: 'Books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad'.

Printers prepared to speak on the record say that while this adage no longer holds true for Egypt and Iraq, Lebanon is still "the printing press of the Middle East", as Wael Jamaleddine, general manager of Beirut based 53 Dots, puts it. 53 Dots prints 35 magazine titles such as the high-end, lifestyle publication Aishti. Despite the UAE and Egypt now having more capacity and good machines, "Lebanon has the style, the designers and good prices," he added.

While he would not be drawn on the impact of the uprisings, Jamaleddine said that new presses in Egypt have lowered orders. "I've heard from printers that the Egyptian market is shrinking for the Lebanese as a lot of presses have set up there. It's a big country, with 70 million people, so a dream market for Lebanese printers," he said.

Lebanese printers see how the uprisings could cut both ways for them in future. While change might ostensibly usher in an era of greater media freedom and less state censorship, it could also lead to more printing presses being established once restrictions were removed, which could lead to heightened competition.

One current advantage for Lebanese printers is the country's relatively open media laws, allowing for the publication of images that would be seen as culturally inappropriate in the Gulf as well as copy that would be censored elsewhere.

Raidy Printing Group illustrates the impact of this state of affairs. It operates out of its base in Beirut and also Dubai, publishing up to four versions of a magazine, some censored and some not, each catering for different cultures and censorships. With its international quality control system, some magazines are printed both in Beirut and Dubai for the same outcome from both facilities.

But while there are an estimated 800 printing presses in Lebanon, only a handful are sizable operations with significant capacity and printing to international standards such as the ISO quality certification, and the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) or PEFC (Programmes for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) eco-friendly certification.

Chemaly & Chemaly is one such large player, having a 14,000 square metre facility in Beirut and presses in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Raidy Printing Group prints some 120 magazine titles every month and only 30 percent of its overall production portfolio is for Lebanese clients. It opened a 7,000 square metre press in Dubai in 2007 to cater to the burgeoning Gulf market but also to have a second base of operations in the event of instability in Lebanon, as occurred in the July 2006 war. Orders were re-directed from Lebanon to Dubai, and it provided a sense of security to clients, according to MarieJoe Raidy, creative director and a member of the founding family. Clients from Saudi Arabia, for instance, were not able to visit Lebanon during and following the conflict, so would be handled at the Dubai office.

Hundreds of magazine titles, books, fine print books, brochures and corporate publications are printed in Arabic, French and English for export each year from Lebanon throughout the MENA, Europe and United States. School book publishing accounts for a significant amount of business, exporting to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Jordan and Morocco.

In recent years the sector has felt the encroachment on its regional market dominance from printing presses that have opened in the Gulf, Egypt and Turkey, while the financial crisis that hit the UAE in late 2009 has brought down printing costs, which are now around 10 to 15 percent lower than before in Dubai. "Prices are now more or less the same as Lebanon. One of the reasons prices were lowered in Dubai was due to real estate costs going down," said MarieJoe Raidy.

With printing revenues in the MENA region forecast to increase to around USD11 billion by 2015, up 33% from USD7.7 billion in 2009, according to a study by industry consultants Pira International, both Raidy Printing Group and 53 Dots are expanding their facilities to anticipate rising demand.

Raidy did so on a purpose built site from its initial 7,000 square metre facility in downtown Beirut to a 20,000 square metre 'Print City' on the outskirts of the capital, for which the contractor was Eurographica, a German specialist in printing press construction. In October, 53 Dots opened a new USD 17 million printing facility in the suburbs of Beirut, installing Heidelberg, Iberica and Vega machines. The company also invested USD 3.5 million in packaging facilities. Its size will be 12,000 sq mtrs in its first phase of development and 22,000 sq mtrs in its 2nd and final phase.

"Going into packaging was part of our diversification strategy, and there is demand in the market for high quality printing," said Jamaleddine. "Basically I think in the near future people will print less books and magazines due to the internet, tablets and so on, so we are trying to shift 50 percent of production over to packaging, which I hope, and guess, will grow in the future."

The company has started a new line in print packaging with a focus on the food sector. It is working with Liban Pack, a nonprofit private association representing stakeholders from the packaging and industrial chain in Lebanon. Liban Pack is focused on bringing added-value to locally made products through high quality packaging.

With internet usage in the Middle East growing by 39% in 2010 to 86 million users, up from 64 million in 2009, according to statistics released by Google, and overall penetration set to rise from the current 29% of the region's population, e-publishing is set to increase. But printing will not go away, said industry players, with possibly even a boost from e-commerce as online ordering becomes more available. Indeed, some USD90 billion of goods and services were sold online in the MENA last year, up to 37% in 2009, according to the technology startups and services website Startup Arabia, with books as one of the top items purchased.