FINAT continues to support label community with guidance as collective sounding board for its members

Dear Members and Friends of FINAT,

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic and subsequent economic ‘lockdown’, members of the label community across the globe have been busy coping with the challenges in terms of worker health and safety, worker absenteeism, the demand for critical goods in the food, pharma, and medical sector, and the limited availability of raw materials upstream due to transportation barriers and claims on chemicals for disinfection purposes.

FINAT and national associations have been supporting their combined members with selected information and guidance and as a collective sounding board for members wishing the share and/or acquire best practices for their business. In these unprecedented times, we are all in this together. For information please visit our special COVID-19 webpage.

On 31 March and 16 April, FINAT hosted webinars to provide a status update to the membership of the situation around Europe and an outlook into the coming weeks as national lockdown measures are being adapted. We also held a ‘quick scan’ among our converter membership to identify the impact of the COVID-19 situation on the industry in the short and medium-term. The results were presented during the webinar of 16 April and later updated with additional responses coming in after the webinar. See the full report here. Some interesting findings:

• More than half of the converter community has been affected since the outbreak, mostly due to raw materials supply, but also due to staff quarantine and delivery of the final product to the market.
• Almost half of the respondents reported substantial increases (on average +20%) for the pharma and food sectors in the short run, not only due to demand for critical goods but also because of stockpiling by customers.
• On the other hand, more than one-third of the respondents has been severely hit with reductions in demand of between 35-40% on average, mostly due to reductions in demand for non-critical food products, alcoholic beverages, and cosmetics.
• Only a small 15% minority has not been affected so far.
• According to a two-third majority, the forecast for the next 1-2 months is negative.

At the FINAT COVID-19 webinar #3 to be held on Tuesday 28 April at 13.00 CET (for registration click here) we will assess the latest status. Now that lockdown measures are slowly being relaxed in some countries, it is however also time to start looking ahead beyond the pandemic and address questions like:

• How do we anticipate the market and our operations will evolve in the coming months?
• Which measures have companies taken to survive the crisis in terms of business contingency plans, cash flow, and working capital, short term redundancies, government support?
• What is the impact of the disruption of the supply chain in Asia for the label value chain?
• How can FINAT and the national associations help their members with their disaster recovery plan?

These and other questions will be addressed interactively during the next COVID-19 webinar. You are kindly invited!

In case you are interested in the recordings of the previous COVID-19 webinars, please click here. (You will have to be a registered FINAT member to access this page.)

Best regards,

Jules Lejeune

Managing Director