India: Young Managers in labels and packaging

The printing industry at large has continued to change and evolve every few years. The narrow web label industry, which became a diversified segment of the large sheet-fed printing market, started with purely flatbed letterpress printing process. The equipment mostly came from the east, especially from Japan.

Sheet-fed printing, which is the mother printing segment, evolved to switch over largely to offset printing, while narrow web label printing, through western influence, adopted the flexographic or flexo printing process.

The smaller printers remained with the flatbed printing for investment reasons and the more successful ones started opting for flexo presses, which were expensive, and continued to upgrade with even more escalation in prices. This created entry barriers for the smaller upcoming label printing companies.

Of late the entry barriers to flexo are going away. With Indian and Chinese flexo label presses becoming affordable and coming in with upgraded versions, a lot of printers are now thinking of moving into printing flexo labels.

With modernity dawning in India and aided by a young literate workforce, competition is going to get tougher due to the following trends:

• Offset packaging printers are eying the higher growth rate in labels are investing in label printing

• Flexible packaging printers are also moving into labels

• Existing label printers want to expand and modernize in an effort to retain their customer base

   • Offset commercial printers are losing market share to the internet and are trying to diversify into packaging, whether through labels or cartons

Digital label printing will see great expansion in India, but as of now Indian printers have put their decision on hold while they decide the right time to enter, as it is largely felt that this technology will keep evolving and what is available today will be obsolete soon. Moreover compared to their present setup, they do not see much advantage in making huge investments in digital printing. Everyone knows that eventually a substantial shift will come, but there is still time for that.