• Pack-machinery purchases to hit $5.48 billion—PMMI: Consumer and industrial-goods companies will increase their packaging-machinery expenditures 4.0 percent over the previous year, says a survey of packagers conducted by the Arlington, VA-based Packaging Mchy. Mfrs. Institute. The seventh annual Purchasing Plans Study suggests that six of eight market segments (beverages, chemicals, durables, foods, personal-care and converters) will grow during the year. These make up approximately 81 percent of the US and Canadian packaging machinery market.
• Five leading-edge applications of UV curing were recognized May 4 during the e/5 UV-EB technology expo and conference held in Charlotte, NC. For its winning bar-code label innovation, Sony Chemicals Corp. of America was challenged to convert durable, permanent ID tags to withstand heat or fluids in hostile working environments. Its line of UV-cured ribbons, launched late in 2003, work in temperatures up to 500 deg C, and are strong enough to label manufactured products before they go through high-heat processes such as sintering.
• Graphic Packaging Intl. to expand Ft. Smith operations: The Marietta, GA-based converter says it will add a new 300,000-sq-ft manufacturing plant to the Arkansas site. Existing Ft. Smith operations will be transferred to the new plant in the second quarter of 2005, streamlining sheetfed-offset printing production and lowering costs, GPI says. Ap-proximately 135 employees will be added to the new plant's headcount.
• Blend of traditional and high-tech: Paperboard converter Rock-Tenn Co., Norcross, GA, installs two new printing presses, which it says are the first of their kind in North America. A wide-web, UV-inkjet digital press (the.factory) from Ghent, Belgium-based dotrix NV is now running at Rock-Tenn's Winston-Salem, NC, plant while an H.C. Moog GmbH (Rue-desheim am Rhein, Germany) sheetfed-gravure press has been installed in Candiac, Quebec, Canada. Rock-Tenn and dotrix formed a strategic alliance in August 2003 to commercialize wide-web digital printing.
• Hartsville, SC-based Sonoco agrees April 29 to acquire privately-held POP-maker Corr- Flex Graphics LLC for approximately $250 million in cash. The acquisition, to be known as Sonoco CorrFlex, is expected to close by the end of this month.
• Pressure-sensitive labels, which surpassed wet-glue labels as the leading label type in the late 1990s, will account for 55 percent of the global market by 2007, says a new study by Cleveland-based The Freedonia Group. Plastic-film labels are expected to capture 27 percent of worldwide sales in the next three years.

The list of new package-printing and converting trade shows for 2005 keeps growing: Add P 2005, an international fair for process-oriented package production, debuting June 15-18 at the Fairgrounds home of organizer Messe Stuttgart in Germany.

The event will focus on exhibitors of kraft liner, paper, plastic, sheet metal, glass, adhesives, paint and all the resources for the production, converting and printing of packaging, organizers say. Other exhibitors will include machinery and equipment suppliers for paper production, corrugators, boxmakers, film extruders, plastic processors, unwinds/rewinds, test systems and materials handling. P will also examine all related printing processes—flexo, gravure, offset, silkscreen and digital.

Many industry members agree that the discontinuance of the Papro trade fair created a vacuum that could not be filled by reintegrating package production into Drupa, K or Interpack, says Messe Stuttgart. "A large number of companies have told us that such a trade fair has been lacking during the past few years," says Thomas Walter, head of the MS Technology and Production Com-petence Team.

According to Messe Stuttgart, the world market for packaging materials and containers is worth about $420 billion. The German packaging market alone is reportedly worth $28 billion and has been growing about 4 percent a year since 1999. In Europe, there are a total of 22,000 companies involved in the production of packaging, it says.