This carries multiple benefits to printing customers, including cost and time saving, lasting print quality without need of adjustment, sustainable and reusable plate mounting solution that significantly improves carbon footprint and fast ROI.

Ghanshyam Pandey, senior manager, marketing and technical support, Tesa Tapes, said the printing sector is growing at a good pace, approximately double-digit growth, if we see the first quarter performance of 2021. The key growth drivers are increased demands for packaging films, especially for food products, personal care/ hygiene and label solutions for the pharma sector. This growth multiplied during Covid-19 where most household items in urban areas were purchased via eCommerce mode and packaging is an essential part for this mode of supply.

He said, at present, most customers are talking about constant growth in market demand and each customer certainly wants to leverage this opportunity. However, looking forward to 2021, as the second wave of Covid-19 is hitting India, it may create some bottlenecks for growth.

The key bottleneck includes consumables price rise (forex & other factors), supply chain issues due to manpower and transportation (domestic and import) and others, which may affect the process efficiency and printers may result in losing their margin even if they maintain productivity. 

“The printer may overcome this with proper cooperation to raw material suppliers. For example, by giving an advanced forecast, freight cost can be optimised,” Pandey said.

What should the Indian printers do to improve their production methods? Pandey suggests working with limited people to avoid Covid-19 and focusing on bulk/profitable order (to run machines continuously).

“Tesa, as a tapes expert, can make customers aware about our superior quality tapes so that they can produce high quality print jobs along with high process efficiency while using standard operating procedure for tapes,” he added.

He said for the customers, supply chain and availability of material is a prime concern. “We are also educating our customers about how Tesa can help them to overcome their issues with right selection of tapes as well as using good SOP,” he said.

He added that the next big thing in the market is sustainability, which comprises 3R (reduce, recyclable and renew). For example, reduce the thickness which helps decrease material consumption, recyclable (wash off labels and recyclable packaging films) and renew (reusable products). 

“The Twinlock self-adhesive sleeves are being used to mount photo-polymeric plates used in the flexo printing process and this technology helps printing companies achieve their sustainability drive,” he concluded.