Asia

The Domino label press, its first foray into printing presses, is in the field with the company expecting a flood of orders over the next year DOMINO PRINTING SCIENCES HAS produced a 5% increase in sales for 2011 to £314.1 million, the 33rd year of growth for the Cambridge business. Pretax profits also rose to £57.4 million, up 10%. The company found it tough going in North America and parts of Europe, the UK and Germany excepted, but noted good growth in the developing markets in central Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The company has increased its staff

Currently there is not a good enough infrastructure in place to get optimum benefit from biodegradable packaging, even if it is widely available. Europe leads regulatory reform, with the US trailing behind. Asia and Australia are making headway, but Asia (and in particular China) suffer from a confused approach. Consumers are driving demand, with major retailers including Coca-cola and Walmart getting on board. However, despite increased demand, the key cost barriers for suppliers are R&D costs, production costs, and economies of scale. PLA dominates bioplastics use, but new materials are being developed from algae and microbacterial sources and advances

The latest FESPA Economy Survey has revealed that 70% of respondents are looking to diversify their business to improve business growth. The top areas in which print service providers (PSPs) plan to develop into are interiors (17.4%), label printing (16.67%) and signage (15.53%). Over half believe that the market has not fully recovered (52.44%) but the outlook of printers remains optimistic despite the challenging environment, with three quarters of respondents believing that the market will grow in 2012, with an average expected growth of 14.5% across the year for their business. Reflecting on 2011 end of year sales, 20.4%

Packaging maker Amcor is looking to accelerate growth by expanding its presence in emerging markets, where it says it can achieve sales growth of between 10 and 15 per cent without making any new acquisitions. Amcor also said on Thursday that it expected earnings in 2012 to be substantially higher than in 2011 as a result of improvements to its operations and higher than expected benefits arising from recent acquisitions. Amcor acquired Alcan Packaging for $A2.3 billion in August 2009 and bought US plastic packaging business Ball Plastics for $US280 million

WOOD DALE, IL -- Toyo Ink America, LLC, a member of the worldwide Toyo Ink Group, announced that it has expanded production of liquid and ultraviolet inks for packaging applications, in the North America region. The company recently relocated its headquarters to a more spacious, state-of-the-art facility in Wood Dale, Illinois. The roughly 109,000-square-foot-facility dramatically boosts the company's production, development and technical support capability by affording room for new equipment, an expanded R&D laboratory and an increase in sales and technical staff. At the new site Toyo Ink America plans to produce and develop water- and solvent-based liquid inks,

The worldwide economy continues to hold back press orders who are finding solace in the Chinese market to balance stagnant Europe and North America PRINTING PRESS MANUFACTURERS ARE continuing to have a tough time: Heidelberg’s first quarter orders fell below the Ipex quarter of 2010 and amount to stability in terms of the previous quarter; Komori’s sales also dipped against the equivalent quarter though it blames the strength of the Yen and weakness of the European economies; only KBA, reporting its half year results claims an increase in sales thanks to brisk business in Asia. Heidelberg continues to target