Good prospects for growth

"Despite its threats, rapid development offers significant possibilities for capturing the market from wet-glue labels and direct printing, and for finding entirely novel end-uses for self-adhesives. Prospects for the new millennium are good as long as the self-adhesive labelling business can maintain its competitiveness in this turbulent situation."

Globalization is a challenge
According to Strömberg, the globalization of production is a business engine, and the label business also feels its effect. Globally-operating manufacturers of various products require self-adhesive label qualities that are manufactured according to the same specifications and meet the same quality requirements all over the world. In order to ensure deliveries of standardized products around the world, manufacturers of self-adhesive laminate and label-printing houses should, in the future, be able to operate on a global level.

"The integration of Eastern Central Europe and Russia to the western market introduces interesting prospects for globalization. New possibilities for the growth of self-adhesive labelling will arise when conditions in Russia stabilize in the beginning of the 21st century. There are no signs of division in the market: the same materials will be in use around the globe," Strömberg says.

Smart label on its way
"Electronic commerce is still a question-raising factor, and its impact on the development of the self-adhesives business is unknown. The only certainty is that electronic commerce will expand and provide an opportunity to widen the use of self-adhesive labelling in logistic chains."

Strömberg points out that, in the future, various methods will enable much more information to be packed into a self-adhesive label than is possible today. The use of bar codes will expand, but the greatest changes will be a consequence of new technologies which allow information transfer without printing. In the future, smart labels will have an important role in the logistic chain and security. The use of smart labels will include, for example, theft prevention and verifying the origin of a product.

Self-adhesive labels gain ground in product labelling
New printing technologies, which allow the printing of smaller and more individual label series, offer a clear opportunity to broaden the use of self-adhesives. New end-use areas can be found, for example, in product labelling. From the perspective of product development, new printing methods are a challenge because the quality requirements for materials will change considerably.

In addition, self-adhesive labels have good prospects in product labelling for winning new end-use areas from direct printing. Success requires that self-adhesive laminate meets the quality requirements of fast labelling systems and is competitive in terms of cost.