LMAI holds annual general meeting in Delhi

It was the first time that the annual general meeting was held in North India. It was attended by over 100 members including Avery Dennison India, UPM Raflatac, SMI Coated Papers, Genius Flexo Machinery, Zircon Technologies, Jain Transfer, Global Graphics, Precise Graphics, HP, Nilpeter, Multitec, Creed Engineers and Jandu Engineering. 

Informing of new initiatives, Vivek Kapoor, LMAI president, said: ‘The association has partnered with Avery Dennison India for training students from printing institutes.’ Five students have already been trained and given employment from west India. A further 11 from North India will be selected and be given operator training at a nominal fee. A part of the fee will partly be borne by the association. Sandeep Zaveri, vice-president west and treasurer, LMAI, said: ‘Our target is to train 100 students as fast as possible to see how the program is being received.’

An interactive discussion on creating more public print clusters in India also took place. These are training institutes and testing centers for the label printing industry which have already been started in Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Government has offered a subsidy of up to 80 percent to make such clusters in the country. ‘We should get together to form more such clusters,' said Gururaj, vice-president south, LMAI.

Highlighting the hurdles faced in creating a cluster in Mumbai, Ajay Mehta of SMI Coated Products said: ‘Companies are hesitant in sharing information because of which making a cluster is becoming difficult in Mumbai. People from industry have to come forward and share information like capex spent in machinery, number of employees, turnover, etc.’ Zaveri said that seven companies have come together and are in the process of making a cluster for lean management. Total Print Solutions, Creative Labels, SMI Paper Products, Super Labels, Barcom Labels, Shree Ganesh Graphics, Sai Come Systems and Coats and Pack shall be trained on the practice in two years after the cluster is formed.

The meeting was followed by a seminar at the same venue. Amongst the speakers were Vijay Pareek, director of Genius Flexo Machinery, Jitesh Mehta, director marketing, South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, Avery Dennison and Ajay Mehta of SMI Coated Products.

Pareek spoke about differences in servo, full servo and multiple servo machines. He then discussed main challenges faced in UV flexo presses and overcoming problems such as gear marking, barring and dot gain using the latest MPS technology. In his second presentation, he spoke about various dies and cylinders from Kocher+Beck. 

Jitesh Mehta pointed to in-mold labelling as one of the technologies to look out for. He further said, ‘Connecting with a marketer is a key to know what consumer would pick from the shelf.’ A lot of decisions are reached after holding discussions with design agencies. ‘That’s our weak link. Strong linkage with design agency is critical to influence the selection of technology,’ he said. He also suggested label converters to get into strategic material partnerships to be equipped with latest development in label stock, inks, etc.

With a view to improve the working and profitability of the self adhesive label industry, Ajay Mehta first listed major problems the industry is faced with. Some of the issues spoken about were comparison of offset label price with the roll form label price; capacities of narrow web flexo presses installed for self adhesive labels that appear much higher than required; training and poaching of staff; leakage of confidential information, etc. Amongst some suggestions made were demand of price rise to be made by everyone together at the same time and credit not be given of more than 30 days for better business growth.

LMAI has decided to hold more such zonal meetings at regular intervals. The association currently has a total of 275 members.