World Paper and Printing Markets
End-User Trends
The most frequent reason cited by the U.S. newspaper reader for cancelling a subscription is lack of time to read the paper. Dailies in North America and Western Europe have shifted from being a “must-read” to being one among many sources of information. (The same thing hasn’t been happening, however, in China or India. More on this later…) This trend is the most important to understand if you want to know where newsprint is headed in the future.
Similarly, when you look at the future of magazines, catalogs, directories and other printed products, you have to start with this question: what is changing about the use of these products by individuals in the home or office?
Printing paper producers have billions of dollars of capital invested in a technology that supports the distribution of vast quantities of information to huge numbers of people whose level of interest in the information may be changing, along with their preferences about how to get it. These investments also depend critically on the decisions of companies wanting to market to these readers and consumers – with an ever-broadening array of marketing avenues to choose from. Finally, these investments are influenced by the operational and logistical decisions made by companies that create, print and distribute these information products.
But it all starts with the reader or shopper.