This is the time of year when we are all urged not to look back in anger but forward in hope, putting our shoulders to the wheel, our best foot forward and doing it all with a song on our lips. Well, if you want an antidote to that, look no further than the New Year’s Greetings from Monsieur Jacques Attali, economist and sometime advisor to several French presidents. The year 2016 will probably see more terrorist attacks “of unimaginable magnitude,” says Monsieur Attali, with outbreaks of violence in Africa, India and the South China Sea, and a financial crisis “comparable to that of 2008.” And as if that were not enough, there is also, he reckons, a strong probability of pandemics and natural disasters due to climate change. Ebenezer Scrooge couldn’t have put it better.

So where does all that leave the European label industry? Pretty much unmoved, to judge by recent financial results and investment intentions.

Take Herma, for example, Germany’s biggest locally-owned labelstock manufacturer. Sales over January-November 2015 have exceeded budget, and CEO  Thomas Baumgärtner confidently expects annual turnover to break through the 300 million euro limit ($320 million). Profits for the year, he says, will be “ordentlich.” Translated into American English, this means “pretty darned good.” Not content with raising productivity by a series of massive investments over the period 2010-2013, Herma in 2015 hired an additional 120 employees, a 12% increase. The company’s main business is as a labelstock manufacture, and Baumgartner attributes the successful year 2015 to “favorable economic winds blowing in certain of our markets.”  The company’s other business is labeling equipment, and Herma will soon be moving this division from its present cramped location to a new site adjacent too the main plant. There is strong demand for Herma’s labeling equipment, according to Baumgartner, and the US is proving a particularly good market. The company’s main problems are rising raw material costs and the scarcity of skilled labor. Neither of these problems is likely to go away in 2016. However, in the longer term, label papers (and more particularly liners) will surely start to come down in price in response to the new capacity being opened up in Europe by companies like Sappi.

France has surprised everyone, including most French people, by doing rather well economically in 2015, despite the savage terrorist attacks that marred the start and end of the year. Industrial production over the year to December is likely to be up by close to 4%, which will make it the best performer in the Euro zone, beating Germany (+0.2%), and leaving Britain (+1.7%) and the US (-1.2%) at the starting blocks. France’s GDP growth for the year will probably be a modest 1.1 to 1.3%, a poor showing but better than 2014. The French label association UNFEA’s statistics show 2015 as getting off to an exceptionally good start for label converters, although growth is likely to have slowed in the second half of the year. Consolidation among French label converters continued during 2015, and the three leading groups (Autajon, Stratus and Multicolor) are reckoned to control around 20-25% of the label market. These three are followed closely by CCL, and then a little further down the line by several home-grown groups.

One of France’s most successful label converters is the curiously named Cinq-Sept Etiquette. With average value growth in the French label market hovering around 2-4%, Cinq-Sept logged a 12% rise in 2015. Owner-manager Patrick Wack, who acquired the company back in 1995, says, “Any number of label converters say they are service providers. We have put our money where our mouth is.” Despite having up-to-date equipment from Nilpeter, Codimag, SMAG and Xeikon, the company owes its success, according to Wack, to “smooth and error-free information flows both within the company and in its exchanges with customers and suppliers.” One small example shows this converter’s efficient cooperation with its customers in the wine sector. “We noticed how often mistakes were occurring in the back-labels, where you can have hundreds of variations depending on language, country of destination and grape variety. So we developed a basic software interface with a few idiot-proof safeguards, and our customers can now go onto our website and write their own back-labels. Result: a sharp drop in mistakes and customer complaints.” When it comes to ecological correctness, Patrick Wack is brutally frank. “We buy mostly FSC-certified labelstock, and all our inks come from reputable suppliers,” he says. “But when it comes to recycling our matrix waste, or persuading our customers to send their spent liner for recycling, no way. There may be some parts of Europe close enough to ship to a recycling plant, but this corner of France isn’t one of them.”

New resins for old
While the recycling of fiber-based liner continues to cause problems, the situation for filmic liners is looking up. A Scottish company, Polymer Extrusion Technologies, is taking delivery of used PET liner and recycling it to produce new PET resin granulate. One of the companies supplying the used liner is beverage manufacturer Brothers Drinks, in the South-West of England, which had been paying $150 per ton to have its waste liner taken away and incinerated. This recycling scheme, which is being promoted by Avery Dennison, looks promising, particularly as the two companies are about as far away from each other as you can get in Britain without falling into the sea. Liner recycling schemes that really save money are all-too-rare, and we can only hope that other label users closer to Scotland will clamber onto the bandwagon.

Recycling: all countries are serious, but some more than others
It will come as no surprise to readers of L&NW that Germany leads Europe, if not the world, in its concern for recycling. Now the German Food Industries Association, the Plastic Packaging Association and two other highly serious bodies have jointly set up the Zentrale Wertstoffstelle Projektgesellschaft mbH (ZWP), whose remit is to advise the German government as it prepares the text for the planned Recycling Law. In particular, the ZWP will explore and promote cradle-to-cradle recycling, the economizing of scarce resources and reduction of potentially climate-changing emissions. It is not yet clear how, if at all, the future German law will mesh with European environmental regulations. Label association FINAT has for some time (and in cooperation with TLMI) been a supporter of environmental sustainability, and is the initiator of the FINAT Recycling Awards. Since FINAT is also lobbying against European plans to consider release liner as “a component of packaging,” the association’s support for the environment is becoming something of a tightrope act.

More news of digital direct printing
In Europe, as elsewhere, the luxury-goods sector is a highly profitable market for labels and packaging. The trade show Luxe-Pack, held every fall in Monaco (and in May 2016 in New York), gets bigger with every year that passes, and in 2015 had nearly 9,000 professional visitors, including many label and package converters. Among the exhibitors at Luxe-Pack Monaco was German-based Heinz Glas, a manufacturer of flacons for perfumes. The origins of the company go back almost to the time of Gutenberg, but the technology is definitely 21st century. The latest idea from Heinz Glas, launched at Luxe-Pack, is to offer digital direct printing for short runs of flacons. So far this technology, which effectively replaces the label, has not caught on except as a gimmick. But who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Beer that talks back
Using smartphones on labels with QR Codes to provide extra information is old hat. Now the German filling and sealing specialist KHS has designed beer bottles with figures that “come to life” when used with a cell phone app. The Martens Brouwerij based in Bocholt/Belgium is using this feature on its PET beer bottles. If two bottles are brought together, a dialog between the characters shown will start; the people on the bottles will “speak” to each other. This could be the start of a new craze for talking labels. Unfortunately, the Martens bottles are being direct-printed onto the bottle. Ah well, you can’t win ‘em all.

A Korea-changing discovery
With so much information crossing our desks and computer screens it is possible that some L&NW readers may have missed recent news from North Korea. Excavations at the site of the Manwoldae palace near Kaesong have revealed metal characters which would seem to be evidence that printing with movable type existed in Korea in the Goryeo Dynasty, dating back to the 13th century or even further. Interested readers can consult Minje Byeng-Sen Park’s seminal treatise “History of Printing in Korea.” If that seems too exotic, a trip to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris gives the visitor a chance to see the oldest existing book printed with movable type. It is the Jikji, a Korean book on Buddhism, and it has been dated to 1377 – a century before the same idea was started in Europe. Eat your heart out, Gutenberg!