FINAT membership values in 2024

Now that the dust of Labelexpo Europe is slowly settling, and now that three quarters of FINAT’s 65th birth year 2023 are almost behind us, preparations for FINAT’s programme in 2024 are already underway. On Wednesday evening 8 and Thursday 9 November, Amsterdam will host our third Committee Summit in 2023, and we are looking forward to welcoming back our volunteer workforce to the various Working Group and Taskforce meetings. Later in November (date and time to be confirmed), for the fourth year running, members will be invited to an online extraordinary Autumn General Assembly. This time, apart from the statutory budget approval, this meeting is needed to approve FINAT’s amended articles of association, and to fill the remaining vacancies at Board level for 2023.

In the course of this autumn, you will also receive the FINAT Yearbook 2023 with a convenient overview of what took place during the past 12 months, what has been achieved and what the plans are for the period to come. As always, the Yearbook will contain a list of those active in the association, as well as a register of the FINAT membership, currently encompassing some 620 member company facilities in over 60 countries.

ALL EYES ON THE CHARTS

These are challenging times for the European label community. After the Covid-effect has worn out, raw materials and labour shortages, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical uncertainty, energy and raw materials cost rises, regulatory and sustainability demands, economic recession and finally the current market volatility are dominating the scene for the labels and packaging industry globally. As the third quarter is about to end, all eyes are on our quarterly labelstock statistics and the FINAT RADAR report. Will we have seen the end of the market disruptions, or will the adjustments take longer than hoped and will the Covid induced peak years 2020 and 2021 be offset by two years of volume correction?

FINAT AS INDUSTRY BEACON

In times like these, membership of trade associations like FINAT can be the beacon to help in finding answers and solutions to these challenges:

FINAT provides access to the premier network of European business owners, decision makers, suppliers, associations and institutes in the labels and packaging industry;
FINAT’s flagship events, the European Label Forum (the ‘ELF’, next edition 22-24 May 2024 in Athens) and the FINAT Seminar (20-22 November, Barcelona) provide an excellent opportunity for peer-to-peer networking, discussions, learning and the exchange of knowledge.
In between our live events, the FINAT luncheon webinar series provides a monthly online update on a variety of business, technology and sustainability developments.
Our bi-weekly Labelling News Online (LNO) newsletter, our website portal as well as our other knowledge channels keep you up to date about the latest reports, whitepapers, standards and guidelines, such as the FINAT RADAR, our quarterly market review, the recent brochures on PET Recycling and Product Carbon Footprint/Life Cycle Analysis, as well as the FINAT Test Methods.
Our programme of industry awards including the FINAT Label Competition, the FINAT Sustainability Award, and the #LABELicious Competition serve as a label industry show window rewarding excellence in label printing, sustainable solutions and young talent development.
Our structure of working groups and taskforces brings together the label industry’s finest experts to collaborate on joint projects that serve the common interest of the entire label industry, for instance in the case of Celab-Europe (liner and matrix recycling) and the UV FoodSafe consortium (defining guidelines for the safe use of UV curing technology in food labels & packaging).
Our role as the leading body representing the European label industry gives us the leverage to advocate common interests towards legislators, regulators and industry stakeholders.

Those of you who visited Labelexpo recently may have seen the attached infographic of FINAT’s current ‘Four Pillar’ strategy that underlies these programmes. The keywords ‘Community’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Collaboration’ and ‘Advocacy’ are also reflected in the new, ‘circular’ structure of permanent working groups and temporary taskforces.

JOIN OUR WORKING GROUPS

As a member-centric organisation, your participation and engagement is key to our common success. We therefore invite you to consider taking an active role in one or more of our events and programmes. If you are interested please contact Jakovina at the FINAT secretariat (jvhaeringen@lejeune.nl) for more information.

NEW MEMBERSHIP FEE STRUCTURE

With growing challenges and responsibilities comes the need for sufficient resources to fulfil FINAT’s member value proposition. Although the annual market volume of the label industry in European has grown by 14% between 2016 and 2022, and although our membership database grew at the same rate, our membership fee income decreased by 7% during that same period.

The reason for this is industry consolidation. Between 2016 and 2022, the percentage of ‘non-paying’ subsidiaries belonging to the same group as their ‘paying’ corporate headquarter has increased from 25% to almost 45%. In other words: almost half of the 620 listed member now belong to a larger corporate group entity. On proposal by the Board, FINAT members have therefore approved a structural change in FINAT’s membership fee structure. This not only concerns a change in membership fee levels, but also an ‘upgrade’ of group company turnover scales to reflect the increased industry size and company scale.

This week, all member company headquarters received a letter from the secretariat to announce a special ‘industry census’ to update their corporate membership details, on the basis of ‘self-declaration’. This census has been outsourced to FINAT’s long standing data collection partner Panteia from the Netherlands.

Apart from this, all (non-paying) company subsidiaries will receive a message directly from the secretariat to update their contact details and other company records.

We rely on your cooperation to complete this critical operation and ask everyone to respond before 1 November, so that we can kick off the year 2024 with a clean sheet.

I wish everyone a successful final quarter of 2023!