Digital
textile printing is all set to grow exponentially in the coming years driven by
increasing penetration of this sector among Asian fabric printers, especially
in textiles manufacturing hubs such as China, India and other Asian nations. A Fibre2Fashion Market
Intelligence report.
Textiles printing is not a new
thing in the textiles industry; this process has existed for centuries and has
witnessed a long transformation over centuries. Textiles printing is done with
five major methods: block printing, roller printing, screen printing, heat
transfer printing, and ink-jet or digital printing.
Block printing, which is also
referred to as relief printing, is the oldest method of fabric printing. This method
involves printing on to the fabric by the dye being pressed from a carved
object, historically wood, copper but also rubber and now many other materials.
Textiles printing substantially evolved during the 18th century with
the invention of roller or cylinder printing capable of printing with high
speed and quality compared to block printing using series of rollers, each of
which engraved with the design and capable of even print six colours at a time.
Early 20th century laid the
foundation for the modern textiles printing process with the introduction of
the screen printing and rotary multicoloured screen printing during the
mid-20th century. Commercialisation of the digital textile printing at the
beginning of the 21st century completely revolutionised the textiles
printing process.
Since its introduction, this
technology has attracted attention of the industry from across the world and
has captured almost 2 per cent of the market share of the 30 billion sq m
fabrics printing industry from virtually nil in the past one decade. It is
estimated that digitally printed fabrics output is expected to cross 1 billion
sq m by 2017 and 2.5 billion sq m by 2020 growing at a CAGR of 28 per cent
between 2015 and 2020. Asia-Pacific, which leads the global fabrics printing
industry with nearly 65 per cent of the market share, represents nearly 25 per
cent of the market in the digital textiles printing industry dominated by
Europe which accounted for almost half the global output in 2015.
