Berger Paints Bangladesh Limited: flexo and gravure ink market research

Abstract

Ink market in Bangladesh is growing parallel to the growth of printing and packaging material industries. There is significant demand of various types of industrial ink in Bangladesh, such as Flexo Ink, Gravure, Offset, Screen Printing Ink and Letterpress Printing. In this study, focus was mainly given on Flexo and Gravure ink as market size of those ink are quite substantial. The study covered ink producers, cement companies, packaging companies, importers, ink association and packaging association to collect all types of information regarding this industry. From the study, the estimated annual market size of Flexo ink in Bangladesh is 5444 M.Ton in volume and BDT 188.44 Crore in value and Gravure ink is 10,509 M.ton in volume and BDT 370.65 Crore in value. Out of 15 major ink producers in the country, 5 ink manufacturers currently produce Flexo ink and Gravure ink. The big users of Flexo ink in Bangladesh are WPP bag manufacturer companies. Bengal poly and paper sacks, Paragon Limited, Khan Brothers are major WPP bag manufacturers. The major ink users of Gravure are the food packaging companies and among them Premafelx, BRAC printing, Mecca Multilayer, Arbab Poly are the bigger ones. Some cement manufacturers produce their own packaging in their plants, they use Flexo ink to print on their packaging. Seven rings cement, Shah Cement, Desh Bondhu Polymer, and Tiger Cement etc. are some of the companies that are using Flexo ink. Some of the Gravure ink users import the raw materials from outside and hire chemist to make their own ink in Bangladesh. These packaging and cement companies directly import major portion of their Flexo and Gravure ink requirement. Ink and Thinner are complementary goods. Almost all of the thinner are imported from outside of Bangladesh as there are no good thinner manufactures here. From the study, the market size of Thinner for Flexo printing is 7777.14 M.ton / year in volume and BDT 145.24 Crore in value and for Gravure printing is 12892.77 M.ton /year and 232.75 Crore in value. Many big companies like Premaflex wants to inspire the local ink manufactures to make quality ink as the local ink is not yet as good as imported. They would prefer buying from local rather than import but as they really care about quality printing they still don’t buy. As Berger Paints has the technological capacity, so it can explore the whole ink market in near future.