The past year has seen a huge pick-up in volumes of flexible packaging in India that has stretched production capacities installed in the previous year and led to considerable addition of capacity during the year and with a strong order pipeline of film extrusion lines,
rotogravure and CI flexo printing machines, laminators, co-extrusion laminators and slitter rewinders. The demand for higher speeds and increased automation has meant considerable imports from the likes of Reifenhauser, W&H, Mecchi, Bobst Rotomec, Bobst
F&K, Comexi, Uteco, Nordmeccanica and Atlas Titan.
The current year will see a large number of imports of blown film lines from Reifenhauser, W&H, Macchi, Alpine and Windsor Kuhne to leading converters. The numbers from these manufacturers may be as high as 20 with several 7 and 9 layer specialty lines being imported. Several CPP lines of note are also in the pipeline.
Nevertheless, the Indian manufactured machines in all aspects of flexible packaging production are increasingly leveraging the double digit growth of the industry in the country
as well as in exports. These highly engineered and automated machines from established manufacturers such as Rajoo Engineers, Pelican, Kohli, Uflex, Manugraph, SP Ultraflex and
Naph Graphics are relying on the some of the best components and subsystems supplied by global manufacturers such as Nordson, Siemens, B&R and Baldwin Vision Systems.
Co-extrusion laminators
The Uflex co-extrusion laminator at the Uflex engineering division in Noida. Photo PSAAs we pointed out in our last issue a key segment that is currently driving the flexible packaging market is the high growth of the snack food segment. In this segment the laminate structure consists of the printed film on the outside and a metallized film
on the inside which are held together with a co-extruded polymer layer. In the main, converters use Chinese and Taiwanese co-extrusion laminators while some of the leading converters have co-extrusion laminators from Davis Standard.
Seeing the explosive growth of the snack food segment, several Indian manufacturers (as many as ten by some accounts) are now getting into the manufacture of co-extrusion laminators. These include Uflex Engineering, Pelican and a combined project by Rajoo Engineers and Kohli Industries who are launching their co-extrusion laminator at the beginning of 2019. We can expect some of these high-end coextrusion laminators to make achieve several installations in the coming financial year.
