The recent debut of the concurrently held fairs IPAP Printing & Packaging Expo – powered by drupa and pacprocess Tehran - as part of the interpack alliance, exceeded both the exhibitors’ and visitors’ expectations. Some 7,500 experts came to Iran’s most state-of-the-art exhibition center Shahr-e-Aftab (Exhibiran International) to see the products and services presented by 167 exhibitors from 11 countries on 165,900 square feet of exhibit space. The range of exhibits included the entire value chain of the packaging industry and related process industries (pacprocess 2017) as well as printing technologies from the areas of Prepress/Print, Premedia/Multichannel, Postpress, Converting and Packaging, Materials, Equipment, Services and Infrastructure (IPAP 2017). Exhibitors included national companies such as Vana Press, Shargh Sanat and Kooshesh Karan Machinery as well as international companies like Canon Middle East, Di Mauro and Project Engineering.

The organizers Messe Düsseldorf and Barsaz Rooydad Pars Company (BRP) were extremely pleased with the results of the trade fairs. “The importance of the print and packaging industries cannot be rated high enough. They lay the foundation for the competitiveness of a wide variety of products and are closely tied to rising export revenue. The trade fair concept of pacprocess Tehran and IPAP was successful and has created the pre-requisites for a positive development in these key industries,” stated Hamed Irani, Director of BRP.

“We are delighted that the debut of IPAP was so successful. This way we have created a sound basis for the trade fair allowing it to grow and gain in international appeal. The Iranian market offers enormous growth potential and we are confident that with IPAP we are giving our exhibitors and visitors an outstanding platform to tap into this promising market. We will also support the trade fair with our expertise in the future – in line with the motto “IPAP 2018 powered by drupa,” added Sabine Geldermann, Global Head of Printing Technologies at Messe Düsseldorf.

Exhibitors like Ayman Aly, Senior Marketing Manager at Canon Middle East, also rated their participation as very positive:  “The idea of the event is quite good. IPAP is very much needed on this market because the printing market is lagging here. The market needs opening up and there is a lack of business structure, especially in the printing industry. Developing this country and this market will be very important. The quality of the visitors was good and this is an excellent base for next year. We achieved our objectives and are very excited about coming back next year – probably with a larger space. Our wish for next year is to have more competitors at the event as this would attract more visitors.”

Iran is regarded as an extremely attractive market for the industry. With more than 32,000 offset print shops, some 50,000 digital printing service providers and about 65,000 other upstream suppliers to the print industry, it offers an attractive potential for further business developments – especially since the international sanctions were eased in early 2016. The economy faces backlog demand in all areas: A well educated, relatively young population of over 80 million people increasingly requests high-quality packaged products that cannot be produced to competitive standards using local companies’ obsolete technology. This causes local producers to invest in new equipment, opening up business opportunities for foreign companies.