The Converting Curmudgeon

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• Overall, sleeve-type label technology made up 12% of the worldwide market in 2010, preceded by glue-applied labels (41%) and pressure-sensitives (40%). As a primary label type, sleeving accounted for 15% of the global market.
• Broken down by region, the world’s sleeve-label sales last year were Europe—38%, Asia-Pacific—32%, North America—25%, Africa—3% and South America—2%.
• By format, heat-shrink sleeves dominated with 76% of the global market in 2010. Stretch sleeves took 16%, and ROSO shrink sleeves had the remaining 8%.
• Future growth for all sleeve-label formats is estimated at 5% to 5.5% a year. Demand remains the strongest in South American, Chinese and Indian markets for heat-shrink. Top end-users overall are foods and beverages, with sleeves seeing new competition from IMLs for household chemicals and from p-s labels for cosmetics.

Among developments impacting converters:

• Materials: Thinner films, matte films, opaque films, coextruded films, and films with higher levels of shrinkage possible are opening up opportunities in container decoration.
• Sustainability: Market development of PLA-based shrink sleeves to wrap PLA-based containers may answer environmental concerns about all-petroleum-based packaging. Meanwhile, European eco concerns are heightened at any materials used to label PET containers, thus making them problematic to recycle.
• Prices and availability: Rising crude-oil prices are driving up polymer costs and creating greater competition among and shortages of polymer types or lengthening delivery lead times of raw films. Low-price film imports from China are exacerbating the problem, while difficulty with availability of PET-G film in North America continues.
• Direct competition: Worldwide, the rapidly rising number of sleeve-label converters is adding pressure for companies to both maintain margins and prove their technical competence and product quality to customers.