Armor Asia celebrates 20 years

Armor Asia celebrated 20 successful years in the region. This significant timeline was celebrated with all the Armor teams in the Asia region as their subsidiaries in Singapore, China, India and Japan in recognition of two decades of exponential growth.

L to R: Mark Day, Wesley Alves and Hubert De Boisredon celebrating two successful decades of Armor Asia with employees and customers

‘For Armor Asia, it is time for maturity, expansion, ambitions, and to implement plans that we didn’t think were possible before,’ said Hubert De Boisredon, chairman and chief executive officer at Armor, while kicking off the celebrations in Singapore.

On this occasion, the company had invited its distributors to Armor Asia Technical Club (ATC), a conference which discussed its new products, customer challenges, and ways to grow together as well as market trends and opportunities. It was followed by a factory tour and a gala dinner.

Mark Day, global sales director, Armor set the stage by revealing that the company grew by 11 percent in volume worldwide, of which 17 percent growth came from Asia, 13 percent from Americas, and 8 percent came from EMEA markets.

‘The plan is, over the next couple of years, to tip that balance where rest of the world has a lion share with expectation of Asia being a big part of our growth,’ he said.

Wesley Alves, vice president and managing director, ASPAC added, ‘To support the surge in demand and growth, we will potentially have new slitting plants in the ASPAC region. We are further investing strongly in people and continue to launch new breakthrough products such as the new AXRTX, a new grade of thermal transfer ribbon dedicated to the printing of textile labels.’

While colored ribbons form a small percentage of the entire product range, Armor recently launched silver and golden thermal transfer ribbons as well for luxury segment applications to complete its product portfolio.

Day says, ‘With more food traceability and other government regulations being implemented in most parts of the world, we see customers demanding higher quality of thermal transfer ribbons. It brings opportunities in terms of volume and sometimes challenges for we have to develop new products to match the requirement. Our distributors ensure thermal transfer ribbons meet the requirements of end user. Growth is, thus, not driven by volume alone but also by value added products.’

Read a detailed report in Labels & Labeling, issue 3, 2019.