Unprecedented drop in 2009
According to the members of Etma, the European tube manufacturers association, the year 2009 ended on a 5.3% drop compared to the previous year, that is to say a production of 9.65 billion tubes compared to 10.2 billion in 2008.
According to Etma, this production drop cannot be completely attributed to a reduced level of consumer consumption. The tube manufacturers’ customers would have amplified the phenomenon “by rigorously cutting back stocks”.
Dramatic drop in the cosmetics sector
The crisis affected the various markets for tubes in Europe differently. That’s the cosmetics industry, which is the largest market for tubes with a share of about 40 %, was particularly impacted, with a fall of 8.5 % in this sector alone.
The pharmaceutical industry, with a fall of 6.2%, and the relatively small sector for household and industrial products, with a drop of 7.4 %, were also significantly weaker in 2009 than the previous year.
By contrast, tube consumption for toothpaste remained almost unchanged and there was even a small gain of 0.5 % in the food sector.
Progression of laminated tubes
The different developments in the various markets were also reflected in different developments for the different tube materials.
Despite a fall of almost 4.8 % in 2009, aluminium tubes just managed to exceed the 4-billion-tube mark, hence the most important type of tube in quantitative terms. According o Etma, the fall in the production of aluminium tubes is attributable for the most part to declining demand from the pharmaceutical sector and the depressed market for hair dyes.
Weakness in the cosmetics market was the main reason for the production drop of 11.8% in 2009 for plastic tubes.
Total production of laminate tubes just fellshort of the 3-billion-tube mark. “Nevertheless, despite the crisis 2009 proved to be something of a small success story for the laminate tube with 2.9 billion units produced, an increase of slightly less than 1 % year-on-year,” Etma says.
Caution for 2010
Even though the economy has shown a small amount of growth in the first quarter of 2010, Gregor Spengler, Etma’s secretary general is not sounding the all-clear just yet.
“I still cannot see any clear signs of a sustainable economic turnaround, although there has been a slight increase in demand from core markets, partly due to new products and partly as a result of relaunches. And customers are also again stocking more tubes. Growing confidence among European consumers is being tempered, though, by increased unemployment and the possible negative effects of austerity programmes of European governments. It is thus not possible at this point in time to make a serious forecast regarding the development of the tube markets in the second half of the year,” he says.
