Flexo Technology FILM + FLEXO = THE FUTURE
you’ve always got.” Who actually said it is open to debate — it’s been attributed to Albert Einstein and Henry Ford, among others — but there’s no doubting its wisdom. In 2016 Ahmedabad-based Pentaflex
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Films LLP took it to heart. After over 20 years as a leading Indian manufacturer of flexible packaging PE film, the company took the bold decision to add printing to its portfolio: not only that, but to take the flexo route, in a market dominated by gravure. A year later the move took concrete commercial form as a new establishment in Ahmedabad, home to a new Bobst CI flexo press. Just two years after that Pentaflex took Silver with High Honors in the Kodak Global Flexo Innovation Awards — a massive achievement for such a young company. Pentaflex’s Anand Patel acknowledges that he and his fellow directors took a risk, but explains why it was a very calculated one. “Flexo is only about 15% of the FMCG market that we focus on, and most of that is dairy packaging. The rest of the market is largely gravure, so there’s a huge opportunity to win brands over to flexo —
20 June 2020
omebody once memorably remarked that “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what
and we have some really serious factors working in our favour.”
PUSH FOR SUSTAINABILITY Perhaps the most powerful argument for people to take a serious look at flexo is Indian governmental policy, particularly recent wide-ranging legislation designed to enforce greater sustainability in the FMCG sector. Explains Patel: “Many countries have adopted Extended Producer Responsibility, which makes consumer brands pay attention to what happens to their products after use — in particular, material recovery and recycling. In India we’re now catching up, which is placing significant pressure on brand owners to put sustainability front and centre of product development. This will be good news for flexo.” To discover just how good, Pentaflex did its homework, he says. “For example, we researched the current consumption of plastics and film in India, and how this would grow in line with increases in people’s disposable income — which translates into more spending on consumer goods. Add that to the drive for sustainability, and the outlook for flexo is really positive: I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sudden boom in flexo
in the next two or three years — maybe by 40 per cent — before settling down to steady incremental increases.”
PICKING “THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT” Confident as Pentaflex was of the potential, the company took its first steps as a flexo printer in the market it knew best — dairy. In Anand Patel’s words, “that’s where the low-hanging fruit were to be found. Because flexo is already established in the sector, our discussions with those players were simpler. They gave us the understanding we needed to refine our capability — to make sure we were doing things right before venturing into gravure.”
Among the lessons Pentaflex took from these conversations, two were especially important. The first was reassuring: a growing awareness of flexo’s increased capabilities. “In the past, flexo had a bad press on issues like printability and quality, but you can trace that to older technology such as stacked presses. Our Bobst CI press is a different generation of machine altogether, and the word is spreading.” The second lesson was that a huge
opportunity existed for flexo in the reverse- printed laminate market. “Reverse-printing
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