Transition and the run-up to K and Interpack

Fachpack, held every one or two years at Nuremberg, Germany, has been the packaging industry’s first larger gathering in Europe after the pandemic. Last year September it brought together some 800 exhibitors and 24,000 trade visitors, as compared to the 1640 exhibitors and 44,000 visitors two years earlier, and this year, September 26-28, it has been present again with 1154 exhibitors and 32,000 trade visitors. Powtech, a parallel logistics trade fair at Nuremberg Messe, added 494 exhibitors to the three-day event.

Even though Fachpack is mainly a European fair and particularly a window for the German and Italian packaging machinery manufacturers, it attracts about one-quarter of its participants from outside the European Union. Next to Fachpack regulars such as Durst, Epson, Esko, Fujifilm, Heidelberg, Henkel, Köra-Packmat, Kongsberg, Konica Minolta, Mimaki, Mitsubishi, Mondi, Rexroth, Sappi, Screen, Stora-Enso, Toyo or Zünd, companies from Turkey, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia made their presence felt at the show. 

One exhibitor from India, Aerolam Decoratives from Ahmedabad, had a range of packaging materials at its booth, such as CPP film for medical and food grade packaging, aluminum-foil-based bubble insulation film for pharmaceutical applications, reflective insulation board, and expanded crosslinked polyethylene foam. Jindal Films’ European branch had a large booth as well. At Powtech, Emco Engineering from Mumbai showcased its Air Jet Mill series of pharmaceutical powder processing equipment. 

The main issues at Fachpack, which also had a packed program of trend seminars and technical workshops, were brought together under the key theme ‘transition in packaging,’ geared at online shipping, digitalization, product protection, sustainability, and circular economies. Most visitors came from the food and beverage, pharmaceutical and medical, cosmetics, chemical, electronics and automotive, retail, packaging, and logistics industries.

Extremely satisfied with the outcome of the fair,  it’s executive director Heike Slotta concluded,  “Trade fairs are melting pots for new ideas and make the future tangible. Of course, given the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, rising energy costs, and inflation, the near future is going to be anything but rosy. But that is precisely why we need to talk about how we intend to shape the transition. To borrow the jargon of the consumer goods industry, the transition itself has become a fast-moving commodity since sustainability and digitalization have picked up speed, and consumer expectations and the overall situation are constantly changing.”

Due to the fact that next year, the packaging industry will be busy with Interpack (from 4 to 10 May 2023), the next Fachpack will be held in two years, from 24 to 26 September 2024.

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.

The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.

Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.

As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.

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