Cannex & Fillex Asia-Pacific, the biggest-ever international canmaking and filling technology show held in Asia opens in China next month. From 1-4 June 2015, will be a showcase for transformational metal packaging.

Already one of the most intensive of manufacturing processes, canmaking lines are capable of outputs of up to four million cans a day. The industry is also becoming more flexible, allowing it to respond to brand owners’ requests for wider ranges of shapes and sizes.

British canmaking equipment manufacturer CMB Engineering will be using Cannex & Fillex to launch a new range of machines that are programmable at the touch of a screen to work with different configurations, thereby increasing productivity, and allowing users to more readily meet changing demands.Cannex PIC

Organised by SPG Events and backed by The Canmaker magazine, Cannex & Fillex is specifically targeted at can manufacturers and fillers. Visitors will be able to see the latest technologies and services that support a global business which produces almost 500 billion cans a year for customers in the beverage, food, personal care and industrial sectors.

The success of Cannex & Fillex reflects a developing market in China for metal packaging of all kinds.

One of the fastest-growing domestic canmakers is ORG Packaging founded just 20 years ago. Now active in all sectors, its latest venture embraces cans with film-laminated coatings. ORG’s world-class technology, which one of its subsidiaries will be showing at Cannex & Fillex, promises manufacturing with a lower environmental impact.

In an address to The Canmaker Summit last year, ORG director Chris Zhou provided a detailed analysis of how the various sectors of the Chinese canmaking market compare with others around the world. He explained how metal packaging has a smaller share of China’s food packaging markets, showing that there is considerable room for expansion, even though CAGR since 2008 was almost 20 percent.

“Metal packaging has room to grow more from its relatively low market share in China based on its attributes of food safety and premium value,” he said.

Like ORG, another of China’s expanding canmakers is CPMC, part of the giant Cofco food group. CPMC has followed a similar path, broadening its product range from food cans into two-piece beverage cans as demand from the beer and herbal tea markets increased.

This is a pattern that is being repeated across the country an it is why around 200 exhibitors from more than 20 countries will be promoting their products at Cannex & Fillex in Guangzhou; And it is this influence that Chinese canmakers are having on product and material development that is prompting international visitors to converge on the show in search of the latest technology.

Chief executive of CPMC, Zhang Xin says that demand for two-piece beverage cans reached almost 32 billion in China in 2014. This had been driven by supermarkets which wanted more canned beer to sell, and by the switch in the herbal tea sector from three-piece to two-piece cans.

In a market that was 88 percent dominated by bottles in 2013, the potential is enormous with a predicted growth of almost 10 percent over three years, to reach more than 41 billion  two-piece beverage cans by 2017.

It is growth rates such as these that serve as an inspiration to the global metal packaging industry and to the suppliers who work alongside it.

CMB Engineering, for example, is aiming its Reformat range of machines at canmakers who offer beverage cans in formats that are both standard and slim, tall and short. First machine in CMB’s new range is the 3200 Reformat Lacquer Spray machine, which sprays an ultra-thin coating on the inside of the can. By using servo motors, the various speeds of the machine’s drives can be controlled remotely and precisely.

The transformation that is taking place with packaging in China is reaching all sectors of the canmaking business, and is ensuring that metal packaging remains highly competitive, not just in China but worldwide.