Reaching 20 million tons in year 2020 - A dream or reality?

Plastic Industry is geared to reach 20 mln metric tons of processing in year 2020 from the present level of 12 mln metric tons.

Majority of this growth will come from Food and Beverage section, and especially in single serve packages. The life style and increase in disposable income will enhance the purchase of packaged food. Home preparation will come down and fridge will get filled with packaged food, frozen vegetable, beverage bottles and long shelf life milk products. Other growth sectors for Plastics are Infrastructure, renewable energy and agricultural.

This growth in consumption will also put pressure on innovation especially suited for India need. We need design houses to make India a design hub for plastic Industry to be innovative. While we will have 47 million surplus working population, our capability of developing the right skill set with this surplus employable youth is a question mark now. Majority of this surplus population can be converted to budding entrepreneurs in the plastic industry, which has less entry barrier to start but and high hard work is needed to succeed.

To meet the demand forecast the Plastic Industry must churn out high speed machines following the high quality (Q), low cost (C) and fastest execution time (E) path. This culture is not there today, but in year 2015, most of the industry will follow this path. The machinery manufacturers must gear up to give buy back support to processors for replacing the old machines with new energy efficient machines. Machinery manufacturer must put their cost to output ratio low to be competitive against the Chinese machines. If this challenge is not met the fruits of growth forecast will elude the machinery industry.

The plastic industry is represented today by many association with no benchmarked approach. The associations are chasing the foreign currency by inviting more and more foreign companies to participate in exhibition. Net resultis foreign machines are bought by Indian companies for small gain and Indian companies loose market for being costlier. It is time our industry becomes most cost effective. We have close to 3.6 mln tons of Plastic semi-finished parts, toys, medical industry parts etc coming to INDIA duly imported by traders and sold in common market at such a low price that people are thinking of quitting manufacturing and focus on import. This is robbing us of millions of job opportunities in machinery plants, service industry, at actual user end and so on. Hence we have to have a policy on part imports.

Lastly Unless all associations, training institutes, government policy makers, raw material manufacturers and end users meet together on firm policy of "Made In India" And On "Make For India" we will not reap the benefit of organic growth with our equipment and services.


Author: Subba Bangera, Chairman, Active Biz Solutions Pvt Ltd., Ex MD Sidel India.

The Islamic Republic of Iran Business Guide

Edition 2011

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