Bizarre as it may seem, many businesses in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have found that getting their business cards and stationery printed 4,000 kilometres away in Perth, the world's most remote city, is cheaper and faster than going to the local jobbing printer.

How can a 43 (AUS$100) print job be printed profitably and quickly from such a distance, I hear you cry? The answer lies in the recent rise of hub and spoke printing businesses such as Snap, Worldwide Online and We Print It, which operate through shop fronts in the commercial and industrial centres of the big, high-cost cities on the eastern seaboard, but have their printing capacity in B1 CTP print centres in Perth on the low-cost stable-workforce west coast.

The high street print shops on the east coast market the service to local businesses, take the orders and the money, design if required, but, unlike traditional jobbing printers, there is no press or guillotine behind the office wall, just a broadband connection to the Perth print centre.

The hub and spoke printers operate on volume throughput, so business cards are printed on the B1 presses, but printed 200 jobs at a time. Each of the hub and spoke firms uses decent but easy-to-use software, enabling simple management of the huge number of files that are sent over from the myriad shopfronts in Sydney and Melbourne.

Every afternoon (as Perth is three hours behind the east coast), the software automatically gangs up the business cards according to specification, which is straightforward enough as there is little choice of stock, no choice of size, and only a couple of laminating options.

The same applies to letterheads, envelopes, comp slips and so on. After a quick exposure on a platesetter, which sets the press, and a five-minute run of 500 sheets, off come the plates and on go new plates for the next 200 cards.

Once finished, the cards are put on one of the plethora of new courier flights and, hey presto, a maximum of four days after placing the order, the customer has the cards delivered direct to his or her door.

The traditional jobbing printer is, of course, the loser in all this, but many wonder whether Australian print as a whole will soon lose as well, for if the hub and spoke model works by printing in low-cost Perth, a six-hour flight away, why not place print in the rock-bottom China market or super-cheap India, both less than 12 hours by air from Sydney. This sector of Australian print may well go the way of call centres and manufacturing.

Wayne Robinson is a freelance graphic arts journalist based in Sydney. He covers Australasia and the Far East, and is a regular contributor to Australian Printer, Asia Pacific Packaging, and New Zealand Printer. Email waynepmg@tpg.com.au.