Flint Group Opines Ink Prices Will Go up

According to recent reporting by UK-based news website PrintWeek, consumables giant Flint Group has warned that rising prices for raw materials will force prices for printer consumables such as inks, to go up.

Jan Paul van der Velde, Senior Vice President of Procurement at Flint Group, said, “Certain raw materials prices are increasing fast. Different cost drivers are having different effects in different market segments. The key issues revolve around publication inks, given the situation of rising prices for gum rosin and crude oil based products.”

Oil prices not only hit inks but services such as packaging and logistics, he said. Gum rosin prices in China began to escalate dramatically from July, with a 40% hike impacting on pigments and Flint’s hydro carbon/phenolics based ink portfolio – heatset, coldset, sheetfed and gravure inks.

He noted, “Finally, we have also seen significant increases in pigment costs. This has mainly been driven by the ongoing and increasingly stricter enforcement of environmental rules in China and India – both for pigment suppliers and the suppliers of base chemicals for pigment production.”

“It is clear the ink industry is again being confronted with the rising cost of raw materials and it does not look like this will quickly disappear. The result of these rising costs to some of the key raw material markets will inevitably have an increasing impact on the costing of publication inks,” he concluded.