Ink maker’s successful international conference, Asia Coat + Ink Show from today

A day of presentations and panel discussions discussed the theme – trends, issues and way forward.

 

A pre-cursor to the three –day Asia Coat + Ink Show 2015, which commenced today, the conference was inaugurated by Dr NC Saha, director of Indian Institute of Packaging. RY Kamat, president of AIPIMA and director-sales, Micro Inks and BS Kampani, chairman of the international conference were part of the inaugural session.

 

“The Indian printing ink industry is estimated to be around USD 700bn, which is around 4% of the global market, and growing at rate of 5-6%,” said Kamat. He added, “In the coming years, technology innovation, health and safety and environment awareness will shape the industry.

 

The segmentation of the printing inks globally is: lithography constitutes close to 50%, followed by flexo at 20-21%, gravure at around 15%. While digital has the highest growth rate, it constitutes only 4-6% and the others around 9%. Kamat said, “The high automation of the printing presses has put forward a task for the ink manufacturers to innovate. The growth of the ink industry will be closely related to the growth of the economy.”

 

Kampani said that the development and economic growth with the “make in India” campaign, has given all the manufacturers a ray of hope. “There are sectors which are opening up and creating opportunities for the packaging industry, such as eCommerce.” He added, “The eCommerce has been growing at 24$ since 2009 to touch USD 16.4-bn in 2014. This segment depends heavily on packaging, leading to questions, will eCommerce help printing and packagings replace use of newspaper?”

 

In his presidential address, Saha quoting global print statistics, said, of the  global USD 750bn, India constitutes USD 24.6bn. “Today India and China are the two countries which are growing and India is now capable of tapping opportunities with its large population, which was once considered as a bane. While packaging industry in China is growing at 18%, India follows with a 13-15%.”

 

The modern consumer is looking for three As – attention, attraction and appeal. “And to achieve these, automation is the key. And though India lags behind in terms of manufacturing robust machinery, it has an upper hand in ancillary packaging and packaging material, capable of catering to the export markets.

 

The conference had three sessions.

 

The first on print buyers comprising of speakers from HUL (Yeshukant, senior manager procurement), Mondelez (Naveen Damsethi, VP-packaging development) and a packaging expert KM Lakshminarayanan).

 

The second session was on latest developments in printing, packaging and publication industry represented by players in the offset (Iqbal Kherodawala of Printline Reproduction), labels (Ajay Mehta of SMI Coated Products), print and publication (Sanat Hazra of Bennett Coleman) and flexible packaging (A Venkatrangan of Huhtamaki).

 

The third session, innovations in raw material for printing ink industry was filled with presentation by Torsten Schmelich of Eckart, jesus Santamaria of Lubrizol and Sinta Lay of BASF.

 

The highlight of the show was the interaction with CEO from the printing ink industry. Ramu Ramanathan, discussed trends, issues and way forward for the printing inks in India with VK Seth of Sakata Inx, Ashwani Bhardwaj of Micro Inks, Yasuo Ikeda of DIC and BS Kampani of Toyo Ink.