Page 17 - FINAT Yearbook 2011

new interactive website. Members will be able to access up-to-the-minute docu- mentation on legislative, sustainability, and other issues that impact the self- adhesive label industry online. ‘This moves us right into the 21st century,’ says Kurt Walker. ‘Working through a Board and Committees drawn from the industry is a great modus operandi – but its responsiveness is necessarily slow. FINAT’s new internet platform benefits from leading-edge technology will provide members with fantastic access to a broad library of data that can benefit their businesses. After all, FINAT members are mostly family businesses, who don’t have massive legal and management support departments.’
continuing priorities
Once this new platform is fully operat- ional, what will be the next priority on the FINAT agenda? Thinking aloud, Kurt Walker responds to the question: ‘Those very many legislative issues and the concerns around the environment (including release liner and matrix waste recycling, REACH, and other consumer safety issues) are not going to go away. Then we also need to work with our sister organisations to develop a uniform strategy for presenting the benefits of self-adhesive labelling, in order to create greater awareness in the broader packaging industry and grow our overall share of the market.’
‘The Global Packaging Project, once it has established its full portfolio of measure- ment tools, will have a role to play here’, adds Andrea Vimercati. ‘FINAT has been an enthusiastic and willing participant in the GPP, representing the European self- adhesive labelling community as a whole and speaking for it with one strong voice.’
continuing opportunities for self-adhesive labels ‘Self-adhesive labelling continues to offer outstanding flexibility and versatility, with many possible functional “add ons’”, continues Mr Walker, ‘and is
a major facilitator of RFID and product authentication and tamper-evident features. With a 50% share of the labelling market, we need to be really creative to take additional share, in the face of the extensive competition today from other technologies – sleeving and,
increasingly, in-mould labelling.
there’s absolutely no need to be negative.
If the overall market is growing – and as new populations around the world join the consumer society, it certainly IS growing exponentially, the market for self-adhesive labels is also continuing to grow exponentially.
‘Additionally, our industry is stepping more into the wider packaging industry arena, alongside complementary wide- web converting. There are real opportunities here to develop new partnerships and collaborations, and to create a knowledge platform on the many ways in which narrow-web presses and self-adhesive label converters we can support the core packaging industry’s business.’
‘I agree wholeheartedly’, comments Mr Vimercati. ‘It is something that both individual companies, and the national associations can take on – and be creative.
I can tell you that joining Assografici, the Italian printing and paper converting industries association, enabled my family’s company, Pilot Italia, to move into a whole new arena by establishing interaction and understanding.’
finat’s future role
As European industry regains its forward thrust following the economic crisis, the outgoing and incoming FINAT Presidents share a conviction that there is much to be gained at all levels of the self-adhesive label supply chain if FINAT creates an enabling environment for the whole industry where – to quote Marshall McLuhan – ‘the medium is the message.’
‘The self-adhesive label, per se, deserves to be promoted as a marketing tool and as a clever product identifier, and our current and future FINAT agenda is strongly committed to achieving that’, says Andrea Vimercati.
The last word, however, went to Kurt Walker, who added: ‘All FINAT member companies will surely benefit from that approach in an increasingly competitive, globalised business environment. The good times may be behind us, but better ones are certainly ahead!’
But
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finat yeaRBooK 2011 |