John Penhallow03.21.16
If 2011/62/EU means nothing to you, then you are probably not concerned with the labeling and packaging of pharmaceuticals in Europe. For this is the Falsified Medicines Directive, and it was published by Brussels in its final form last month. The pharmaceutical industry now has three years left in which to get its act together, and since the directive runs to 30 closely typed pages, this may be quite a challenge. The FDA has been consulted from the start, which means that if any FDA request is approved by the EU authorities, US exporters will avoid duplicative administrative efforts. When the directive comes into full force in 2018, the legislation will cover all pharma products sold in Europe, whatever their country of origin. Atlantic Zeiser (AZ), a producer of track-and-trace systems, sees the Directive as an opportunity (obviously), but warns that the new regulation, in the words of AZ’s CEO Manfred Minich, “contains partly complex requirements…the technical implications of which are not always evident.” Evident or not, they will need to become set-book reading for any label converter worldwide wanting to serve the European pharma and medical sectors. The problem for the label converter is not so much in the printing or the substrate, but in the serialization and track-and-trace software.
These technologies and many others were on display at the Pharmapack event held in February in Paris. Nearly 400 exhibitors were present for the two-day show, many of them showing innovative label solutions. Atlantic Zeiser showed its field-tested software solution Medtracker, while Schreiner Medipharm, another regular exhibitor at the show, was demonstrating its “Flexi-Cap” a pack-plus-label for protecting bottles containing dangerous liquids against contamination, breakage and tampering. This almost foolproof (but costly) solution is finding a growing market due to increasing presence of hazardous substances in hospitals, it seems. Bear that in mind, or better still try to forget it, if you have the misfortune to be hospitalized. A simpler but less robust solution to the same problem could be seen at the Iwata Label booth. This Japanese label maker’s solution involves a cylindrical plastic cup to hold the glass bottle, plus a wraparound self-adhesive tamper-evident label with a peelable tab.
Major label converters like CCL Label were also exhibiting, which is not surprising when you know that CCL worldwide has 23 production sites exclusively focused on pharma labels. Security, compliance and serialization were the watchwords for this leading label company. Not so for Constantia Flexibles, whose booth at the show was conspicuous for its total absence of labels. The gentleman in charge of the stand (name withheld to protect the guilty) told your correspondent he didn’t know Constantia made labels. No such problem with Reynders Pharma. This offshoot from the Belgium-based Reynders group is now a European leader making pressure sensitive labels and shrink sleeves, often custom-designed, for the global pharmaceutical industry. Next door on the booth of Stratus, one of France’s biggest label converters, flower-scented labels (for drugs?) vied for place with anti-bacterial labels, designed not just for product labels but for doors, bell-pushes and any other hospital surface likely to be touched by human hands.
Good news from Finland
Last month, L&NW’s Narrow Web Europe column reported on the rude good health of German labelstock manufacturer Herma. Now it is the turn of Finnish-based pulp and paper colossus UPM, whose 4th quarter 2015 results were awaited with interest by investors. They showed year-on-year sales just slightly up, but a healthy rise in pre-tax profits. Commenting on this, CEO Jussi Pesonen said, “UPM Biorefining and UPM Raflatac were the stars of this quarter’s business, thanks to their effective measures to improve profitability and their expansion projects, notable in Poland and in the Asia-Pacific region.”
‘SLO’ countries in fast lane
The one essential thing to remember about Slo-venia is that it is not Slo-vakia. Get the two muddled up and you’re sure to offend. Slovenia is the northernmost chunk of ex-Yugoslavia, bordering Austria and with a distinctly Austro-Hungarian style to its capital Ljubljana. Security printer Cetis, based in Celje, employs over 200 and specializes in security labels, shrink sleeves, anti-counterfeit packaging and lottery tickets. The company has offices in Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and, intriguingly, in the West African state of Guinea Bissau. Sales manager Andreja Bezgovsek, in conversation with your correspondent, said the company’s policy was “to expand outside Central Europe,” in particular with security and smart labels. Among its products is an economical temperature-change label used, for example, for white wine. Other products concern security and brand protection labels.
Slovakia is an easier country to pinpoint, being the Eastern part of former Czechoslovakia. It is home to several successful PS label converters, including one called MiF, which has just invested in an up-to-date servo-driven flexo press from the UK’s Edale. The new press, an eight-color FL-3 with 430 mm (17") web width and auto-register, was installed in December 2015, and already MiF’s CEO Michal Filipek is looking to invest in a second Edale press.
Netherlands-based Telrol Group, which in February 2016 acquired its near-neighbor Sentega Etiketten (a former Avery Group company), can reasonably claim to be Europe’s biggest label converter. Following the acquisition, Telrol plans to generate an annual turnover of approximately 200 million euros ($220 million) this year. It employs more than 500, runs 180 printing and converting machines, and will this year churn out more than 1.4 billion square meters of self-adhesive labels and paper rolls. This, to put it in perspective, is enough to cover the whole of Texas and California, with enough left over for most of Montana. Hoessein Hadaoui, joint owner and CEO for the Telrol Group, has built his empire by a series of judicious acquisitions, including Peha labels, Kolibri labels and Q-tronics. In 2014, the Telrol Group was acquired by South Korea’s Hansol Paper.
Britain’s very own Label & Print show
It is possible that few people outside Europe have heard of the Label & Print Exhibition, which was held in late February in Birmingham, England. Nonetheless this show attracted over 300 exhibitors (the number of visitors has not yet been published). Internationally known exhibitors at the show included Domino, Xeikon, HP, Durst, Dantex, and Epson, all makers of narrow web digital presses. Another exhibitor was Impression Technology Europe, which sells digital label presses to end users. Exhibitors also included many label converters, which made the show less focused than the Labelexpo events that are global and dominate the label sector. The Birmingham show is however the first label show on British soil since 1983!
Grafpol
Digital label press maker TrojanLabel broke onto the European scene at Labelexpo 2015, and its moderately-priced presses seem to be selling well. The latest converter to invest in one is Poland’s Grafpol, which previously ran only flexo and offset label presses. This converter specializes in the production of self-adhesive and in-mold labels for a variety of consumer products, catering to both smaller local businesses and world-leading enterprises.
In order to stay ahead of the competition, Grafpol’s CEO Bogusław Meszkes analyzed the many digital solutions on the market, and ultimately decided that the TrojanTwo press, selling at under $45,000, offered them the most efficient transition to digital label production, without having to compromise quality or make large investments.
The emergence of upstarts like Trojan is causing some distress among market leading digital press manufacturers.
From Brussels to Waterloo
The Labelexpo Europe show last fall has been chewed over thoroughly by the trade press, but one aspect hasn’t received much attention. The visitor breakdown by country shows that almost one visitor in six was from Germany. Britain and France, with roughly comparable populations and at a similar distance from Brussels, provided only 8% each of total visitor attendance. For France, the reason is easy to guess: French business people are not too keen on foreign travel, particularly if it takes them to a non-French-speaking environment (OK, so Brussels is mostly French-speaking, but once you cross the threshold of Labelexpo, as any visitor can tell you, the lingua franca is English. For the British under-performance the reasons are more difficult to fathom. The Eurostar train takes passengers from London to Brussels in a little over two hours, and regular air services to Brussels go from over a dozen British airports. The company organizing Labelexpo is English to the core, except for tax purposes, and is no beginner at marketing the event. So why isn’t it more successful at selling the show to its own nationals? Could it be competition from the 2016 label show in England? Unlikely but possible. Or could it be that the Brits are becoming more like the French, not wanting to venture abroad?
The millions of British tourists and residents in Spain, Portugal, France and elsewhere seem to give the lie to that. It could just be – horror of horrors – that businessmen in that group of offshore islands known as the United Kingdom are psychologically preparing themselves for a possible exit (or “Brexit”) from the European Union. English mistrust of any piece of real estate on the “wrong” side of the English Channel is not new. Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt famously said of the water that surrounds that “sceptered isle” that it “…serves it in the office of a wall,” and we all know the attraction of envisioning walls around one’s country. It is not the business of this journal to get involved in politics, but a Brexit, if it happens, will hurt everyone in Europe economically. In a decision (almost) totally unrelated to this threat, your correspondent recently sought, and obtained, French nationality. This makes no difference to his life, or to the amount of tax he pays. It does however leave him wondering whether his side won or lost the Battle of Waterloo.
These technologies and many others were on display at the Pharmapack event held in February in Paris. Nearly 400 exhibitors were present for the two-day show, many of them showing innovative label solutions. Atlantic Zeiser showed its field-tested software solution Medtracker, while Schreiner Medipharm, another regular exhibitor at the show, was demonstrating its “Flexi-Cap” a pack-plus-label for protecting bottles containing dangerous liquids against contamination, breakage and tampering. This almost foolproof (but costly) solution is finding a growing market due to increasing presence of hazardous substances in hospitals, it seems. Bear that in mind, or better still try to forget it, if you have the misfortune to be hospitalized. A simpler but less robust solution to the same problem could be seen at the Iwata Label booth. This Japanese label maker’s solution involves a cylindrical plastic cup to hold the glass bottle, plus a wraparound self-adhesive tamper-evident label with a peelable tab.
Major label converters like CCL Label were also exhibiting, which is not surprising when you know that CCL worldwide has 23 production sites exclusively focused on pharma labels. Security, compliance and serialization were the watchwords for this leading label company. Not so for Constantia Flexibles, whose booth at the show was conspicuous for its total absence of labels. The gentleman in charge of the stand (name withheld to protect the guilty) told your correspondent he didn’t know Constantia made labels. No such problem with Reynders Pharma. This offshoot from the Belgium-based Reynders group is now a European leader making pressure sensitive labels and shrink sleeves, often custom-designed, for the global pharmaceutical industry. Next door on the booth of Stratus, one of France’s biggest label converters, flower-scented labels (for drugs?) vied for place with anti-bacterial labels, designed not just for product labels but for doors, bell-pushes and any other hospital surface likely to be touched by human hands.
Good news from Finland
Last month, L&NW’s Narrow Web Europe column reported on the rude good health of German labelstock manufacturer Herma. Now it is the turn of Finnish-based pulp and paper colossus UPM, whose 4th quarter 2015 results were awaited with interest by investors. They showed year-on-year sales just slightly up, but a healthy rise in pre-tax profits. Commenting on this, CEO Jussi Pesonen said, “UPM Biorefining and UPM Raflatac were the stars of this quarter’s business, thanks to their effective measures to improve profitability and their expansion projects, notable in Poland and in the Asia-Pacific region.”
‘SLO’ countries in fast lane
The one essential thing to remember about Slo-venia is that it is not Slo-vakia. Get the two muddled up and you’re sure to offend. Slovenia is the northernmost chunk of ex-Yugoslavia, bordering Austria and with a distinctly Austro-Hungarian style to its capital Ljubljana. Security printer Cetis, based in Celje, employs over 200 and specializes in security labels, shrink sleeves, anti-counterfeit packaging and lottery tickets. The company has offices in Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and, intriguingly, in the West African state of Guinea Bissau. Sales manager Andreja Bezgovsek, in conversation with your correspondent, said the company’s policy was “to expand outside Central Europe,” in particular with security and smart labels. Among its products is an economical temperature-change label used, for example, for white wine. Other products concern security and brand protection labels.
Slovakia is an easier country to pinpoint, being the Eastern part of former Czechoslovakia. It is home to several successful PS label converters, including one called MiF, which has just invested in an up-to-date servo-driven flexo press from the UK’s Edale. The new press, an eight-color FL-3 with 430 mm (17") web width and auto-register, was installed in December 2015, and already MiF’s CEO Michal Filipek is looking to invest in a second Edale press.
Netherlands-based Telrol Group, which in February 2016 acquired its near-neighbor Sentega Etiketten (a former Avery Group company), can reasonably claim to be Europe’s biggest label converter. Following the acquisition, Telrol plans to generate an annual turnover of approximately 200 million euros ($220 million) this year. It employs more than 500, runs 180 printing and converting machines, and will this year churn out more than 1.4 billion square meters of self-adhesive labels and paper rolls. This, to put it in perspective, is enough to cover the whole of Texas and California, with enough left over for most of Montana. Hoessein Hadaoui, joint owner and CEO for the Telrol Group, has built his empire by a series of judicious acquisitions, including Peha labels, Kolibri labels and Q-tronics. In 2014, the Telrol Group was acquired by South Korea’s Hansol Paper.
Britain’s very own Label & Print show
It is possible that few people outside Europe have heard of the Label & Print Exhibition, which was held in late February in Birmingham, England. Nonetheless this show attracted over 300 exhibitors (the number of visitors has not yet been published). Internationally known exhibitors at the show included Domino, Xeikon, HP, Durst, Dantex, and Epson, all makers of narrow web digital presses. Another exhibitor was Impression Technology Europe, which sells digital label presses to end users. Exhibitors also included many label converters, which made the show less focused than the Labelexpo events that are global and dominate the label sector. The Birmingham show is however the first label show on British soil since 1983!
Grafpol
Digital label press maker TrojanLabel broke onto the European scene at Labelexpo 2015, and its moderately-priced presses seem to be selling well. The latest converter to invest in one is Poland’s Grafpol, which previously ran only flexo and offset label presses. This converter specializes in the production of self-adhesive and in-mold labels for a variety of consumer products, catering to both smaller local businesses and world-leading enterprises.
In order to stay ahead of the competition, Grafpol’s CEO Bogusław Meszkes analyzed the many digital solutions on the market, and ultimately decided that the TrojanTwo press, selling at under $45,000, offered them the most efficient transition to digital label production, without having to compromise quality or make large investments.
The emergence of upstarts like Trojan is causing some distress among market leading digital press manufacturers.
From Brussels to Waterloo
The Labelexpo Europe show last fall has been chewed over thoroughly by the trade press, but one aspect hasn’t received much attention. The visitor breakdown by country shows that almost one visitor in six was from Germany. Britain and France, with roughly comparable populations and at a similar distance from Brussels, provided only 8% each of total visitor attendance. For France, the reason is easy to guess: French business people are not too keen on foreign travel, particularly if it takes them to a non-French-speaking environment (OK, so Brussels is mostly French-speaking, but once you cross the threshold of Labelexpo, as any visitor can tell you, the lingua franca is English. For the British under-performance the reasons are more difficult to fathom. The Eurostar train takes passengers from London to Brussels in a little over two hours, and regular air services to Brussels go from over a dozen British airports. The company organizing Labelexpo is English to the core, except for tax purposes, and is no beginner at marketing the event. So why isn’t it more successful at selling the show to its own nationals? Could it be competition from the 2016 label show in England? Unlikely but possible. Or could it be that the Brits are becoming more like the French, not wanting to venture abroad?
The millions of British tourists and residents in Spain, Portugal, France and elsewhere seem to give the lie to that. It could just be – horror of horrors – that businessmen in that group of offshore islands known as the United Kingdom are psychologically preparing themselves for a possible exit (or “Brexit”) from the European Union. English mistrust of any piece of real estate on the “wrong” side of the English Channel is not new. Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt famously said of the water that surrounds that “sceptered isle” that it “…serves it in the office of a wall,” and we all know the attraction of envisioning walls around one’s country. It is not the business of this journal to get involved in politics, but a Brexit, if it happens, will hurt everyone in Europe economically. In a decision (almost) totally unrelated to this threat, your correspondent recently sought, and obtained, French nationality. This makes no difference to his life, or to the amount of tax he pays. It does however leave him wondering whether his side won or lost the Battle of Waterloo.