Business Management - Industry Trends

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

Times are tough; there’s no doubt about it. Costs are rising, competition is fierce, and the economy is in a tail spin (or nose dive, depending on your perspective) but heading down just the same. “This was a difficult year for the [tag and label] business due not only to macro economic issues including high energy costs and continuing high raw material inflation, but also because of growing competition to labels and tags in the packaging industry itself,” notes Corey Reardon, president and CEO of AWA Alexander Watson Associates. The rising costs of materials—across the board—are at the top of most printers’ lists of

CINCINNATI, Ohio—Schober will exhibit its STP (Smart Tag and Ticket Processor) at drupa stand 11/A44. This machine incorporates Schober’s second Generation RFID technology with the ability to read HF, UHF and EPC GEN 2 tags. The STP product line is designed for contactless readable tickets for public transportation, entrance/access authorization, security identification, as well as airport baggage tracking tags, pallet and case tracking, asset and supply chain management, and more. New features on this second generation RFID technolgy include a redesigned tag dispenser with web tensioning, strategically placed start/stop buttons, and greater information gathering capabilities. An optional static discharge protection package rounds out

Last year, the Flexible Packaging Assocation (FPA) predicted that the flexible packaging industry would grow at a rate of 2 to 4 percent in 2007. In reality, the industry grew about 2.9 percent, according to the FPA—right in its target range. Compared to 2006’s growth rate of 5.1 percent, the more modest increase seems to reflect the hard economic times. packagePRINTING’s 2008 Top Flexible Packaging Converters Survey indicated that growth, though modest, was achieved by the large majority of flexible packaging converters that responded. About 86 percent of these converters reported that their businesses experienced growth in 2007, while 14 percent said business

The flexible packaging industry is, and will continue to be, a relatively healthy segment in the realm of package printing. This doesn’t mean that everything is rosy—not by a long shot. The U.S. economy is being stressed to a significant degree by a credit crunch driven by the sub-prime fiasco, and inflationary pressures fueled by the cost of crude oil, which recently surpassed $110 per barrel. Flexible packaging advantages A slowdown in the economic environment not withstanding, flexible packaging has many factors in its favor. It continues to move into established packaging segments with distinctive product offerings, many times in the form of pouches.