Arvind Narang, chief operating officer of Wifag-Polytype India, the Mall-herlan company in India, with some of the shaped and decorated metal containers for beverages and personal care at Metpack 2017 in Essen
The major breakthrough in the Indian market has been the installation of a second Mall Herlan CMC 200 integrated line at Casablanca at Bhiwadi in North India in 2013-14 and the first line CMC 200 at the new Ball India plant in Sanand, Gujarat in October 2015. A fourth new CMC 200 integrated can making and decoration line is under installation at Greater Noida and should be commissioned by the beginning of June.
A CMC 200 line with an output capacity of 200 cans a minute, or approximately 5 million cans a month, starts by can forming from a slug of metal and then trims, brushes and decorates in an integrated inline operation. The decoration generally consists of a base coat, printing and varnishing. The global success of metal packaging in recent years comes from the development of new coatings. At Metpack 2017, several companies are speaking about their new coatings for food contact and other sensitive uses—about bisphenol-free coating for food and beverage contact containers.
In addition, a new 2-piece beverage can-making line has come up near Colombo in Sri Lanka, in partnership between the EasyPac-Can Ends group and the Sri Lankan cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan. This line for producing aluminum can in 185, 250, 300, 330 and 550 ml sizes is being used by local beverage makers and also for exports to India and Bangladesh. New developments include bottle-shaped cans, screw-top closures,embossed surfaces and the production of smaller and yet smaller metal containers. Other innovations at Metpac seen so far include special printed foil lids and pull-top closures.
Watch out for live coverage of events as they unfold at interpack 2017. Our editor, Naresh Khanna, European Editor, Ron Augustine and Mumbai correspondent, Shardul Sharma are covering the event.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.
The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.
Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.
As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.
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