2016 has been a fantastic year for us at Pulse Roll Label Products. In addition to sales growth in both the UK and in Europe, we’ve also focused on building our presence in the Asia-Pacific region, which offers great opportunities for future growth. We’ve invested heavily in expanding and strengthening our team, particularly in the areas of technical sales and service but also in R&D and operations and have been delighted to welcome many skilled and experienced new members of staff over the past year.
In October 2016, we were awarded the prestigious Investors in People Standard (IIP) accreditation, demonstrating our commitment to continuous improvement and high performance through good people management. The Investors in People accreditation follows our success last year when we were also recognized with a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade, a standard of commercial excellence and the UK’s highest accolade for business success.
Our focus on R&D to provide high quality products and innovative ink and varnish solutions has contributed to our growth once again this year, and this remains a key part of our business strategy. We continue to see a move towards digital color management in the label industry. As an ink company we understand how critical it is for brand owners to have consistent color, and this was the key driver for the development of our PureTone UV flexo ink system. We wanted to develop an innovative ink solution for the narrow web printer to support a more efficient production workflow offering complete prepress color control and optimum print quality.
Interest in our PureTone ink system as part of a total color management concept has been incredible. Many label printers are moving towards a digital workflow with the aim of achieving ISO standards in flexo printing as well as color management, and we have been working closely with our customers to help them increase production efficiencies, reduce waste, minimize press down-time and increase overall profitability. For example, Berkshire Labels switched to our high strength PureTone mono-pigmented mixing bases that allow finer grade anilox rolls to be used. This has not only improved print quality but also reduced their anilox inventory.
Premium laser-markable variable data printing for brand owners, retailers and label converters is an area of tremendous potential. We are partnering with DataLase in this segment, and we have been selected as DataLase’s preferred narrow web ink supplier. To that end, we developed PureCode, our new UV flexo coating, which provides excellent marking on the final label.
It’s an exciting time for us at Pulse Roll Label Products. We are looking forward to the year ahead as we certainly expect to witness further growth in the UV flexo and narrow web sector in 2017 and beyond.