For India’s leading label stock manufacturer, SMI Coated Products, the recently concluded Labelexpo India 2018 was a tremendous success with the company receiving a very encouraging response from the industry.
“We have been participating in Labelexpo India for a long time and for us this is the best Labelexpo India ever. The number of people who have visited and the quality of visitors have been great. The way people are looking at investing is just fantastic,” said Ajay Mehta, managing director of SMI Coated Products on the last day of the show.
When asked about the reason for such a great response from the industry, Mehta said it was hard to pinpoint specifics, but credit should go to demonetization and implementation of GST.
“Because of demonetization, the money that was lying in unproductive assets is now moving into productive assets. GST is also a contributory factor. When both demonetization and GST happened in a quick succession, people were not able to understand what the benefits would be. I think people are now seeing the benefits,” Mehta argued.
Takeaways from Labelexpo
Having met a variety of industry stakeholders over the three-and-a-half days, Mehta was able to pick up some clear trends that were unfolding in the Indian label industry.
“There are two clear trends that are evolving in the industry. First is that there are a lot of convertors now looking at hybrid presses and the second is that there is a lot of buzz about security solutions,” he said.
Some other trends he talked about is that of greater automation, focus on waste reduction, decrease in run lengths and focus on digital presses.
Talking about adoption of digital label presses in India, Mehta said that as the market grows demand for those presses will also go up. Citing some examples of developed markets, he said that the size of the label industry in these markets is very large and that is where digital label presses have been very successful.
However, he said rather than looking at digital technology just from the short-run point of view, Indian convertors would do well to think of the technology as an enabler to offer innovative and unique labelling solutions. “This approach is what will be a key driver for growth of digital technology in the Indian label industry,” he added.
SMI’s 25th year celebration
At Labelexpo India 2018, an important theme at SMI’s stand was celebration of company’s 25 years of existence. The company will be organizing a function of 2 February 2019 to commemorate the milestone.
“We will showcase our factory, our system of working and hopefully this will inspire others to make in India. In fact, I should say that the function will be to showcase the whole concept of Make in India rather than just SMI,” Mehta concluded.
