Published by ChinaMNC · Ouhai

Longgang Printing Expo Moves to New Industrial Complex: What Foreign Founders Should Know About China’s Printing Cluster

A practical look at the 28th Longgang Printing Expo for foreign founders, with facts on scale, venue, and Longgang’s printing industry base relevant to company setup and operations in China.

Longgang Printing Expo Opens With a New ‘Exhibition-Market’ Model

The 28th Cross-Strait (Longgang) Printing Industry Expo and the 2026 East China Packaging Technology Exhibition opened on October 26 at Longgang Modern Printing Port, according to the Wenzhou municipal government website. The Longgang Comprehensive Materials Trading Market also opened at the same time.

The event pairs a three-day “dynamic exhibition” with a year-round “solid market.” The two are linked, with the stated aim of supporting the full printing supply chain and upgrading the city’s “China Printing City” profile. For foreign founders evaluating China as a manufacturing or sourcing base, the details of the event offer a useful snapshot of how one industrial cluster presents itself and what infrastructure it is building.

Expo Scale and Layout

According to Li Yuxin, curator of the Longgang Printing Expo, this edition maintains a “paper and plastic equally weighted” focus. The exhibition covers 30,000 square meters in total and uses four halls—A, B, C, and D—with 600 international standard booths. It brings together 200 domestic and overseas exhibitors.

The expo focuses on the whole printing supply chain. Exhibits span printing equipment, post-press processing, printing consumables, innovative technologies, and creative packaging products. Equipment, substrate, and ink manufacturers from across China, along with Wenzhou-based printing materials operators, are concentrated at the venue. The organizers describe it as a specialized, high-level packaging industry exchange and display platform for East China.

What the Exhibitor Mix Signals

The presence of equipment, materials, and consumables suppliers in one place matters for founders who need to compare machinery, inputs, and packaging options. The source does not provide exhibitor lists, pricing, or procurement terms, so founders should treat the expo as an introductory touchpoint rather than a sourcing decision point in itself.

New Venue: From Old Town to Modern Printing Port

This year the expo moved from the old urban area to the newly built Modern Printing Port in the new city area. The organizers describe this as a “exhibition-market integration” model intended to create a printing exhibition that does not close.

The Modern Printing Port was jointly developed by two state-owned enterprises: Wenzhou Modern Jinhua Real Estate Group, under Wenzhou Modern Group, and Longgang New City Construction Development Group. The project has a total floor area of about 127,000 square meters and total investment of RMB 620 million.

The complex is designed as a “front shop, back warehouse” industrial complex integrating exhibition, sales, and storage. Its stated purpose is to address long-standing weaknesses in Longgang’s printing industry—small, scattered, and disorganized operations—and to connect the full chain of raw material supply, display and trade, warehousing and logistics, innovation and research, and cross-border commerce.

Practical Relevance for Founders

For foreign founders registering or operating a company in China, a complex that combines display, trade, storage, and logistics can reduce the number of separate facilities a trading or light-manufacturing business needs to coordinate. However, the source does not specify leasing terms, eligibility rules, or foreign-investment access conditions for the complex. Those points should be checked directly with the operator or local authorities.

Industry Scale: Longgang’s Printing Base

The source provides a set of figures that illustrate the size of Longgang’s printing cluster:

• 897 licensed printing enterprises
• 47,000 related market entities
• 150,000 people employed in the sector
• 26 printing industrial parks operating around the clock
• Full-chain output value exceeding RMB 50 billion

Printing is described as Longgang’s most prominent calling card. The expo was first held in 1998 and has run for 28 years. The source says the exhibition and the industry have grown together and witnessed Longgang’s development from small private workshops into a nationally known printing industry cluster. It also credits the expo with helping to establish designations including “China Printing City,” “China Gift City,” and “China Printing Materials Trading Center.”

Reading the Numbers Carefully

These are cluster-level statistics published by the government source. They describe the local industry as a whole, not the scale of any single company or the opportunities available to a particular investor. Founders should use them as context, not as a forecast of individual business outcomes.

Product and Buyer Shifts

At the venue, Jiang Chengshan, general manager of Longgang Aojie Technology Co., Ltd., described changes in printing processes. New techniques such as embossing and raised varnish have continued to emerge, and printing applications have expanded from traditional packaging boxes into cultural and creative products and trendy toys. The buyer base has shifted accordingly, with cultural and creative factories and gift and craft enterprises becoming important new customer groups.

Jiang’s company has attended previous editions of the expo. His trajectory—from bringing machinery from elsewhere to exhibit, to setting up a production line locally because of the industry, to now presenting Longgang printing as a local company—is presented in the source as mirroring the development of Longgang’s printing industry.

What This Means for Market Entry

For foreign founders, the shift toward creative packaging and new applications suggests demand for suppliers who can handle varied, design-led work rather than only standard packaging. The source does not name specific buyers or provide market-size estimates for these segments.

Key Takeaways for Foreign Founders

• Venue matters: The expo’s move to Modern Printing Port reflects a shift toward integrated exhibition, trading, warehousing, and logistics infrastructure.
• Supply-chain breadth: The expo covers equipment, post-press, consumables, technologies, and packaging products, making it a broad but introductory view of the sector.
• Cluster scale: Longgang reports hundreds of licensed printers and tens of thousands of related entities, indicating a deep local supplier base.
• Verify details: The source does not address company registration procedures, foreign-investment rules, tax treatment, or lease terms. Founders should confirm these with official channels before making commitments.

This summary is based on information published by the relevant Chinese government website and is general information, not legal or tax advice.