Track and trace driving growth in packaging equipment sector

The US packaging equipment market looks set to grow by 3 per cent or more this year, and coding and serialization is driving the increase.

That was the message from packaging and processing equipment organisation PMMI at the start of its flagship PackExpo event, which got underway in Chicago yesterday, and represents a sizeable uptick on the industry’s performance last year.

The total packaging market was around $10bn last year, with $7.5bn of that total coming from domestic manufacturers – inching up 0.3 per cent on the prior year - and the remainder coming from imports which fell 4.3 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, medicine traceability initiatives such as the EU Falsified Medicines Directive and Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) in the US – along with the adoption of unique identifiers (UID) for medical devices - are driving an expansion of the pharmaceutical packaging equipment market.

Similarly, the food and beverage is also growing well thanks to legislative initiatives such as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and its traceability requirements, will help push the US packaging equipment market to $8.5bn-plus by 2020, according to the PMMI.

“The labelling, decorating and coding and case handling machinery groups are forecast to grow the fastest of all machinery types to 2020, at [compound annual growth rates] of 3.9 per cent and 2.5 per cent, respectively,” it said.

Drilling down into the pharma sector with a survey of around 60 companies, PMMI has found that two-thirds intend to buy new equipment in the next 12 month, and serialization features prominently in that spend.

Among the findings were that around half of all larger pharma companies are already prepared to meet the FMD and DSCSA deadlines, and interestingly many are opting to build aggregation into their systems from the outset. Aggregation involves linking the individually coded packaging levels to cartons, cases and pallets used in shipping, which is not explicitly required in either the US or EU legislation but is expected to be an operational requirement.

The pharmaceutical sector is forecast to grow the fastest of all sectors through 2020, at a CAGR of 2.8 per cent. This is followed by the beverage sector, which is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 2.4 per cent.

Further signs of the health of the sector came from a strong increase in order backlog, which has been shrinking of late but rocketed up more than 14 per cent last year.