In his opening session on “World-wide Market for Print: Identifying Global Opportunities for the Print Industry”, Ralph Nappi, president, NPES and GASC, said, “The world market, especially the emerging markets are expected to grow significantly across sectors (with an 8% worldwide growth rate for the period 2012-2017) and the packaging sector occupying a sizeable share of the growth projection”

In his detailed analysis Nappi also projected China to be the top print market with a CAGR of 8.6% for the period of 2012-2017 and India occupying the seventh position at a CAGR of 6.8%.

“It is imperative that printers have to capture the expected growth in packaging and labeling sector through new applications and also prepare themselves for disruptive innovation,” Nappi explained.

The day-long event addressed various topics including digital printing, brand colour management for printing and packaging, automated colour management, packaging industry overview, trends in newspaper production, management best practice and also a panel discussion on leveraging new media.

“The industry, on the whole, requires a paradigm shift by looking at themselves as holistic brand marketing partners rather than mere print service providers,” said V Balakrishnan, marketing head of Konica Minolta. This was echoed by several other speakers in the conference.

Other eminent speakers included K Balaji, director of Kasturi & Sons, B S Kampani, managing director of Toyo Ink, and Steve Ballinger, director of training, IDEAlliance, USA among others.

The conference also saw the formal partnership being announced between APL Machinery and Air Motion Systems for the latter’s LED-UV machines.