Business Management - Industry Trends

PHILADELPHIA, Pa.—With a new year comes new a packagePRINTING Excellence Awards competition. For our 23rd annual print competition, we are accepting the entries in the usual categories: labels, wine labels, flexible packaging, folding cartons, corrugated materials, and student-produced entries. But, this year you will also be able to enter our new Sustainability Category, which recognizes excellence in package printing using sustainable materials. We are also offering additional marketing incentives for award winners this year!

PHILADELPHIA, Pa.—With a new year comes new a packagePRINTING Excellence Awards competition. For our 23rd annual print competition, we are accepting the entries in the usual categories: labels, wine labels, flexible packaging, folding cartons, corrugated materials, and student-produced entries. This year you will be able to enter our new Sustainability Category, which recognizes excellence in package printing using sustainable materials. We are also offering additional marketing incentives for award winners this year!

BROOKFIELD, Wis.—After successful project financing in Latin America last year, MPS is offering the global narrow web industry a financing solution. MPS' financing program is specialized and taylored towards the label printing industry. Finance officers are knowledgeable and committed to the market and can react very fast to individual requests.

This financing solution will let MPS customers obtain low interest rates, terms of 2 to 5 years, and supplementary to local credit. Total procedure between application and final approval, excluding preparations of documents by customer, would take about 6 to 7 weeks.

packagePRINTING wants to see what good work your company is producing for the industry, as well as Mother Nature.

When presented with a challenge, MPI Label Systems stepped up to the plate, impressing its customer, as well as the judges of this year’s packagePRINTING Excellence Awards.

The show achieved its primary role - to gather the best examples of machinery and materials from a wide variety of international and Indian manufacturers and enable visitors to compare technology and make their decisions on future investments.

In 1985, Frantz was hired by Huston Patterson as general manager, where he worked on Sangamon Greeting cards and assisted in establishing national sales territories for labels. The LPIA Hall of Fame is conferred to that label or packaging executive (printer or supplier) who has reached an unsurpassed level of excellence and achievement in the industry—a leader who has gone far beyond the standard obligations to become a dominant force in shaping the business of label printing.

Many of today’s leaders of package printing companies have spent their entire careers in the industry; not so with Frank Gerace, president and CEO of Multi-Color Corporation (MCC). A relative newcomer to the field, he spent the first 20 years of his career working for consumer products companies, learning and managing business operations from a different perspective. Gerace has used his experiences to make a significant impact in the package printing community. Since taking the reigns at MCC, he has transformed the company into an industry powerhouse, with 10 consecutive years of record revenue growth. This stellar business performance is well-recognized by his peers

PALO ALTO, Calif.—HP has announced that one of its Graphics Solutions Business customers, Digital Printing and Imaging (DPI), is using an HP Indigo press 5000 to produce nearly two million personalized youth-league baseball cards in an innovative sports-themed promotion with Nestlé Drumstick brand sundae cones. Through the program, consumers can visit a DPI-developed web site, upload an image, enter a youth’s team name and player statistics, view a PDF proof and then order a pack of 16 cards. DPI’s print production workflow for the cards includes an internally developed web-to-print application linked into an HP SmartStream workflow driving the HP Indigo press 5000. The

DUSSELDORF, Germany—At the recent staging of drupa 2008 print media trade fair, the 1,971 exhibitors from 52 countries unanimously reported an extremely high number of promising contacts and successful purchase deals. Overall, drupa exhibitors announced deals concluded worth more than Euro 10 billion. Industry insiders suspect the actual investment sum to be considerably higher. Around 391,000 visitors from 138 countries and 3,000 journalists from 84 countries traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany to gather information on innovations, developments and new fields of business. Accounting for 59 percent of the visitor total, international visitor participation increased by 4 percent compared to drupa 2004. Particularly contributing to this