• Harper donation sets up flexo endowment at Cal Poly: Ron and Katherine Harper, founders of Charlotte, NC-based anilox-roll supplier Harper Corp. of America, make a generous donation to the Cal Poly Graphic Communication Department's 60th Anniversary fundraising campaign. The donation establishes the Ron and Katherine Harper Endowment to support flexography education and laboratory development at the San Luis Obispo, CA, school.
• Ampac Packaging buys converter Flexicon: Cincinnati-based Ampac acquires the flex-pack maker on Jan. 13 as "an important cornerstone in helping achieve long-term consumer packaging growth goals." The purchase follows Ampac's July 2004 acquisition of controlling interest in Kapak Corp., another prominent flex-pack printer and pouchmaker.
• Appleton acquires NEX to grow packaging capabilities: The Wisconsin-based substrate provider purchased primary film manufacturer New England Extrusion, Inc., on Jan. 12 for approximately $68 million. NEX films are sold to flex-pack converters that serve the food, personal-care, medical and industrial markets.
• Cascades expands in Ontario, Russia: The Canadian paperboard converter agrees Jan. 17 to buy the assets of the packaging division of Dover Industries, Burlington, Ontario. The buy represents annual folding-carton sales of about US $28.7 million. Cascades is also expanding its presence in Eastern Europe by opening a new office in Obninsk, Russia, southwest of Moscow.
• Folding-carton shipments sustain growth in 2004: According to the Alexandria, VA-based Paperboard Packaging Council, the US folding-carton industry emerged from the recent recession in Feb. 2003, when shipments rose into positive territory (2.0 percent). Overall, folding-carton shipments grew 4.4 percent by value and 4.3 percent by volume last year. Based on the group's projections, the US carton market also reached $9 billion in overall sales in 2004.
• Bemis buys majority ownership of Brazil's Dixie Toga: The Minneapolis-based package-converting powerhouse acquired majority ownership Jan. 5 of one of the largest packaging companies in South America. Cash price for conttrolling interest in Dixie Toga was reportedly about $250 million. The company makes plastic tubes and thermoformed cups in addition to flexible pack-aging, labels and cartons, with annual sales of more than US $300 million last year.
• Various return metrics for packaging converters show that flex-pack makers do better than average over the past five years when compared to rigid-container, paper and paperboard companies, says M&A specialist Piper Jaffray, Minneapolis. The economics of value-added flex-pack converting appear to be a bottom-line positive for the industry.

Surgical patients next up to be RFID-tagged? A first-of-its-kind system meant to eliminate wrong-site surgery has been approved by the FDA.

The SurgiChip, a radio frequency identification device (RFID) solution, uses RFID printer/encoders and labels from Zebra Technologies (Vernon Hills, IL). The system embeds and prints information on an RFID "smart" label that travels with the patient into surgery to help prevent errors. The company said the system should be viewed as another vital safeguard to prevent wrong-site, wrong-patient and wrong-procedure medical errors.

The SurgiChip can be programmed and used in many types of surgical procedures. It was invented by Bruce Waxman, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon and founder of SurgiChip (Palm Beach, FL) and developed by AMT Systems (Cheshire, CT), a healthcare applications integrator and reseller for Zebra. AMT put together the hardware necessary to perform all the steps of the procedure as well as writing all of the software needed to read and encode the chips. The FDA says that the SurgiChip is the first such marker to use RFID technology to mark an anatomical site for surgery.