Label buying volumes to increase in Europe

As part of the inaugural FINAT Radar report, brand owners have projected growth in their label procurement of 3.61 percent in 2014.

Jules Lejeune documented labelstock demand in Europe from 1996 to 2013

Earlier this year, FINAT announced the launch of Radar, a member-exclusive half-yearly publication that will report trends and growth rates at all levels across the European narrow web supply chain.

More than 50 FINAT label converters participated in the first Radar survey, which focused on sales and profit trends, production data and capital equipment procurement trends. Converters from every European region participated in the research to enable benchmarking analysis in each market.

In this survey, participants were asked to predict revenue growth over the course of the next six months for each major end-use sector they serve (food, beverage, pharmaceuticals, consumer durables, etc.), in addition to providing their companies’ turnover growth for 2013. FINAT said this data enables converter members to gauge their performance and projections against the European market as a whole, and against companies in their own specific region.

In parallel to this, the Radar Brand Owner Survey asked companies to project growth and/or contraction rates for their label purchases over the next year. FINAT said this is essential in order to cross reference converter projected growth rates with what brand owners are predicting label procurement increases will be, in order to calculate growth rates for the market that are as close as possible to what the future will actually deliver.

These surveys resulted in a reported average projected converter turnover growth per end-use category in 2014 of 3.08 percent, with the average projected brand owner label procurement volume increase in 2014 ay 3.61 percent.

The debut Radar report was presented at the recent FINAT Congress, where Jules Lejeune also documented labelstock demand in Europe from 1996 to 2013 showing that the market volume had doubled in the last one and a half decade to just over six billion sq m. In 2013, overall demand grew by 3.5 percent over the prior year – an increase that was mostly achieved in the second half of the year, with non-paper (film) labelstocks growing at 5.9 percent and paper stocks at 3.3 percent.

Regionally, the countries to the east of Europe evidenced the greatest growth in 2013 over 2012 at 6.9 percent, with all other regions showing modest growth. The outlook for 2014 is positive, based on Q1 year-on-year results, both in terms of material grades and by region.