Page 51 - Print21 magazine Sep-Oct 2022

Print21+PKN LIVE
The half-day event will also feature presentations from commercial print businesses that have added packaging – in cartons, in flexibles and in labels – who will share their stories about entering these markets.
Reboot growth
Since Covid restrictions ended
and the ANZ economies emerged sputtering from two years of lockdowns, the industry has been awash with tales of print businesses looking at the packaging market
as a route to reboot their growth aspirations.
The biggest of them all, IVE, has signalled it will be moving “aggressively” into fibre-based packaging, and has a heap of cash ready to acquire a business to turbocharge its entry into the market. Opal is spending $140m on a new corrugated plant, which will include four new printing lines. Start-up innovator ePac
is set to build a second new pouchmaking plant in ANZ, making the decision less than
a year after opening its first.
“Packaging, with its consistent demand – we have to eat and drink every day – and its rapidly evolving market dynamics, including a whole new customer market in the new entrepreneurs, is a market that is open to innovation, disruption, new ideas, new service.”
These are all huge companies, but the story is the same at the other end of the scale. For instance, PacPrint saw a rush of smaller commercial print businesses entering the labels market. The show had the likes of Revolution in Ballarat, and Footprint in Mildura, ordering complete
digital label printing lines for the first time. Even among the smaller companies packaging is becoming a real winner, for example Minuteman Press in Melbourne attributes its strong growth to its packaging development.
Digitally printed packaging is
not just a new way of impressing an image on a substrate. With its ability to print a different image on every sheet, and with no time-consuming
and expensive make-ready, it offers a raft of new benefits to brands, benefits that will enable them to amplify and engage.
The opportunity
Packaging is appealing to commercial print businesses as a new market opportunity because it is not a market that is going to slow down
– you can read a magazine on the internet, but you can’t eat your Cornflakes online – and because the market is rapidly splintering; the
big brands are versioning like never before, and a whole new breed of
food and drink entrepreneurs are emerging. With versioning – there are now 10 different types of Cadbury Dairy Milk for instance – and with the new bespoke food and beverage producers, the packaging imperative is for one or more of short-run, on- demand, with high graphics.
Add to this variable data, famously seen in the Share-A-Coke campaign, or the Hungry Jack UNO competition – which will be featured at the Print21+PKN LIVE! Event – and it is
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Pullquote
Foilmakers local
Terry Newman, director, says that Foilmakers - part of Milford Astor - prides itself on its service offering, saying, “it is second to none”. Newman also says, “We have a wide range of products, so if someone decides they want a metallic pink or crimson or whatever, we can make it. We are a fully Australian-owned company, and we have plenty of sales representation – our sales reps are in front of the customers a lot, so we can hear and adapt to their needs.”
Newman points to cold foil, sourced from Univacco in Taiwan, as a growth area for Foilmakers’ customers. “There is increasing demand for roll- fed and flatbed cold foil, and Univacco has proven to be excellent for that range of our products, he said.”
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