THE DATA FRONT

68 | l&l
The main pyramid in Chechen Itza
ancient Mayan city. Yucatan, Mexico
Focus on Mexico
Globalization has created the opportunity for Mexican converters to improve their businesses and drive
towards increased product quality. Danielle Jerschefske reports
Competition is more intense than ever. Success calls for high
productivity, regular investment, consistent quality control
and more. All of the fastest growing and most profitable label
companies have learned to balance these demands, including
many of Mexico’s label converters. Through diversification,
standardization and alliances, Mexico has a competitive force
of label printers, eager to improve, and planning for growth.
Jose Luis Bezaury, CEO of Litoplast, a division of Grupo
Colibrí, has been in the industry for over 40 years. He
believes globalization has ‘forced the industry to deal with
the expanding world by commanding businesses to invest in
technology and employee training. This, in turn, has helped
Mexican companies learn to compete with outside competitors
that had greater advantages such as variety, pricing, quality
and other manufacturing virtues that the Mexican industry had
previously lacked.’
1994 marked a difficult period for the nation when it went into
a deep recession for nearly two years. Yet, those pressures
provided opportunity to those with a plan, and in 2009 Mexican
converters are again rising to the challenge.
Diversification and investment
According to the 2008 Label Converting in North America
market survey published by L&L, shrink sleeve production
in the region has increased 5 percent in the last two years.
20 percent of respondents said that they are manufacturing
shrink sleeve labels. Homing in on the Mexican market, the
percentage of converters producing shrink sleeves appears to
be much higher than in the US and Canada. 75 percent of the
converters interviewed for this article offer shrink sleeve labels
within their product portfolio.
Far ahead of the recent growth spurt in shrink sleeve labels,
Litoplast, traditionally a cut & stack offset printer, moved into
shrink production in 2002. Jose Luis Bezaury says, ‘I saw the
market was moving from cut & stack offset labels towards film
flexographic labels and realized that it was time to expand
into another technology. So we invested in a fully loaded
20in, 8-color all UV sleeve machine.’ Since then, Bezaury has
purchased three more presses to build the flexo side of the
business to equal sales to the offset.
A supplier to a large food chain in Mexico, Bezaury has seen
the benefits of flexo and believes this is the way forward. ‘We
plan to expand flexo significantly over the next year or two,’ he
adds.
A young company at three years old, Promographics opened
business as an in-house packaging supplier for a local hair
cosmetics company. Producing appealing and complex 16
pt cardboard boxes at 2-300 ft/min on a water-based Nilpeter
press, managing director, Ricardo Villar saw the value he could
bring his customers by offering label production. ‘In moving
into the label market we now offer a turnkey solution to our
customers,’ Villar says.
To diversify into label production as a complementary
offering, Promographics invested in an FB Nilpeter, all GEW
UV flexo press to print film for shrink sleeve labels, and a
Karlville seaming machine and cutter. ‘Already having Nilpeter
flexo technology, it was natural for us to expand with the same
brand,’ Villar explains. Since this investment, Promographics
has grown its shrink sleeve business to be a quarter of total
production, while the rest remains in boxes and PS labels and
pouches.
Not only has this expansion provided a turnkey solution to
its main customer, but has helped increase business outside
of the health and personal care industry. ‘In the next few years
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