It has been a tough week to concentrate with the financial year ending and Mr Trump’s antics always in the background, but as our regular readers and correspondents can observe, I am taking a special interest in the Indian label industry for our regular Wednesday Labels & Smart Packaging eZine. The 2025-26 financial year has been a hot one for our label industry.
Our label press manufacturers are now recognized globally, and they have managed to collectively reduce the import of flexo label presses from Europe, America, and Japan to as few as a dozen. This is a steep drop from the four or five dozen such presses imported annually just a few years ago. Their market share has dropped drastically as label converters have purchased approximately 225 presses, including about 25 digital presses in the year gone by.
Where did these 225 presses installed in the past year come from? A back-of-the-envelope guesstimate (after talking to manufacturers, distributors, and label converters) indicates that about 150 flexo presses came from the approximately one dozen Indian manufacturers, about 40 from China, and a dozen from the European, American, and Japanese OEMs.
Altogether, the Indian label press manufacturers made approximately 200 machines and exported anywhere from 40 to 50 of these. Increasingly in the case of companies such as Multitech and Nilpeter India, these went to developed markets including Europe and the US. While the Middle East and African markets are growing for Indian OEM’s, Russia has also emerged as a strong market for India-made label and flexible packaging flexo presses. The Indian flexo presses vary from 250 to 800 mm wide, and some are talking about 1-meter-wide presses as well. A significant number of 450 mm and wider flexo machines are being used for short and mid-run flexible packaging.
As far as the 25 digital label presses installed in the past financial year, as many as fifteen have come from Konica Minolta, HP, Domino, Durst, Gallus, and Epson. Another ten have easily come from Indian and Chinese manufacturers. In this segment, there is a shortage of high-quality engineers, in the sense that the good engineers typically prefer to be managers rather than hands-on engineers.
The expectations for the coming year vary, from continued robust growth to slightly flat compared to the year gone by. Frankly, more investigation and conversations are needed to come up with a better forecast. Nevertheless, do look for improved information and guesstimates in the forthcoming Wednesday Label & Smart Packaging eZines.
Converters innovate
In my discussions with label converters over the past week, I have discovered that many of the knowledgeable label converters now call themselves solutions providers and are continuously attempting to avoid the price-sensitive, commoditized label market. These solution providers are experimenting with new products even when the perceived demand is not there. They invest in all kinds of new technologies to leverage their abilities to see process and product possibilities that others don’t.
This brings to mind converters such as Citrus Innovation in Hyderabad, whose new plant contains machines for RFID labels along with their highly configured Spande flexo press that was shown at Labelexpo in Barcelona. While the new machines are in production, the number of customers for the RFID applications is few. The R&D team is busy prototyping and aligning the technology with demand creation and customer education as to the cost benefits of using RFIDs in various applications.
Another young converter is working on a sustainable label solution with an expensive investment. The R&D will take time, but as the laws on plastic waste management gain traction, this solution will fit well in single-polymer waste streams.
Raman Anandchal of Neovation in Gurgaon is another label and packaging converter who does not produce huge quantities of labels at all. He only provides special solutions for track and trace and smart labels, tags, and packaging applications that require precision, consistent quality, and an understanding of how these will be used in automated consumer situations. A specialist in providing boarding passes and luggage tags for Indian and global aviation companies and airports, his solutions need to be dynamically personalized at the customer level at automated self–check–in machines. Neovation provides creative solutions, including security and track-and-trace across materials and applications ranging from PayTm sales QR codes, to yogurt lids and PVC shrink sleeves with embedded holographic logos for security and brand protection.
Debottlenecking and workflow automation
In my encounters with label press and ancillary equipment manufacturers and distributors, I also learned that there is a serious push for efficiency in the label market. Considerable investments are going into ancillary equipment and automation to bring all the processes, including in-line or near-line to save startup waste and waste in moving from process to process.
Automated unwinds are now accompanied by automated rewinds, and offline steps are being integrated in-line or near-line. Apparently, the significant cost of materials and manual handling is compelling these efforts at streamlining the production workflow and investments in automation. The press is now only the centerpiece in what is increasingly being seen as a manufacturing operation.
