How a print shop outlived the paperless office

It outlived the paperless office by moving out of the way of it. The letters and the reports really did go, so the shops that lasted went after whatever can't be emailed: the label on the bottle, the box round the gloves, the fifty menus a restaurant wants by Friday.

The funny number

I expected printing to have fallen off a cliff in the pandemic. In 2020, with offices shut and schools online, Malaysia's printing industry shrank by 4.6%. The whole economy shrank by 5.5%.

So print did slightly better than everything else, in the very year it had the best possible reason not to. The authors of that study, who are academics in printing technology at UiTM, were surprised too, and they call the idea of print as a sunset industry premature.¹

I'd take that a little carefully. Printing was about 0.3% of GDP in 2022, by the study's count, and a national average hides a lot of misery.¹ One of the managers they interviewed reported a drop in business of 50% to 60%.¹

What really did go

The old money was in things people read, and the study tracks that from a useful angle: where advertisers put their budgets. Newspapers' share of Malaysian ad spending fell from 42% to 7% in a decade.¹

Newspapers' share of Malaysian ad spending, in per cent

The people who made the paper felt it first. Malaysia's pioneer newsprint maker began a voluntary winding-up in 2017, with its shareholders citing "declining newsprint demand".² Nobody was betting on a newspaper revival.

Some printers also told the researchers that orders for envelopes, business cards and letterheads were well down in 2020.¹ That's the paperless office, turning up a bit late and all at once.

What came instead

Here's the list I liked best. Asked who was doing well in the bad stretch, one of the managers named these:¹

• glove makers
• healthcare
• courier delivery
• food packaging

Look at what those have in common. None of them is reading anything. They need a box, a sticker or a pouch, and you can't send a PDF to hold a rubber glove.

The same paper says packaging and labels offset some of the 2020 fall, with online selling pushing up demand for cartons and flexible packs.¹ A manager there expected "traditional printing" to shrink and on-demand work to grow.¹

You can see the move in small deals too. In 2025 a listed die-cutting company agreed to buy a printing firm for RM3 million, as its way into label printing.⁴ One deal proves nothing, though I do like that the buyer wanted labels, not letterheads.

Why a small job became worth doing

This is the part I find most interesting, and it's about setting up, not printing.

On a traditional press the money goes in before the first sheet comes out: plates, calibration, wasted make-ready. A writer selling the digital case says that's where minimum orders come from, and that on digital those costs are "absent or insignificant".⁵ He has a side, so hold that loosely, but the logic is simple enough to draw.

What one menu costs on a made-up press, in ringgit

Say a restaurant wants a hundred menus, on my made-up press above. Nobody pays three ringgit thirty for a menu they'll reprint when the price of nasi lemak moves. Take most of that setup away, and a job that was silly becomes an ordinary Tuesday.

What the shop has to carry

Now the less romantic side. A press in Malaysia needs a licence under the Printing Presses and Publications Act. Run one without and the law allows up to three years in jail or a RM20,000 fine, which is an unusual thing to keep in mind when you're pricing bunting.³

Then there's the machine, which costs the same in a quiet month as in a busy one, and the paper, which you have to buy before you're paid. I couldn't find a Malaysian figure for what a small press spends on paper, or what its machine costs to own, so I can't draw you where the money goes without inventing it.

My rough guess is that the machine is where a small shop gets hurt. One manager in that study mentioned customers delaying orders and so paying late, which is a nasty thing to happen to anyone holding a loan on a press.¹

So if I owned a small press, I wouldn't ask whether print is dying. I'd ask how much of my month still comes from jobs a customer could turn into a PDF, and I'd treat that number as the thing to shrink.