December 2020 Print Bulletin
FROM THE PRESIDENTS’ DESK
Dear members of the print industry, wish you a very warm,
happy and healthy year ahead.
As we close the year 2020 and look forward to a new start, we are faced with mounting challenges. The most significant amongst them is a sharp rise in input costs. The labour costs are rising. Insurance is costly. Logistics is demanding more. And, now the core input supplies are becoming dearer – especially the recent hike in paper prices is putting tremendous pressure on our industry. Especially when these prices seem to be increasing overnight through monopolies, duopolies, and cartelization in the supply market, we think, dialogue and immediate intervention is required to relieve our industry of these mounting input costs.
While your Associations are approaching government authorities for their intervention, we suggest you look at your input costs and demand price corrections from your clients and customers. Getting the right prices for our products and services is a matter of survival for our businesses.
We are also advocating for the relief to MSMEs banking with cooperative banks. The recent government schemes are not extended beyond the public sector banks. Therefore, cooperative banks are unable to approve fresh or enhanced loans to their MSME clients. This is not only hurting the MSME sector at large but print in particular.
Another concern for our industry is the state of the rural economy in India and the ongoing farmers’ protests. The rural markets generate much business – boxes for farm produce such as fruits, for example. The slowing rural economy and low consumption are directly hurting demand for the print and packaging products from the rural markets. Your Associations are bringing these concerns to the notice of government authorities through AIFMP.
One promising trend we are witnessing is a slow but gradual growth in the commercial print segment. Many printers are busy fulfilling the orders for diaries and calendars from private companies and businesses. Such green shoots will help the commercial print segment crawl back to normalcy much sooner than later. Reviving real estate and automobile sales in urban centres also present a ray of hope for the commercial print sector.
Throughout the challenging times, your Associations are working hard to reach out to you with knowledge-rich webinars. Your participation in these webinars encourages us. In this issue, we present the reports of two such webinars. Read these stories. Watch the webinar videos if you missed them. And, we hope you would attend the next webinar live and find answers to your queries straight from the expert speakers.
We would like all of us to retrospect about the year gone by. We have forgotten the success of PAMEX at the beginning of the year. We have left behind the success of PS20 and MMS-LTA. We are ignoring the lessons the year has taught us. We are not celebrating enough the digital transformation it has brought in our lives. Before we bid adieu to the year 2020 and remember it only for the pandemic, let us quote Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, to change your perspective towards the year going by and the continuing challenging times: “Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.”