PETpla.net Insider 05 / 2018

EDITOUR PET planet Insider Vol. 19 No. 05/18 www.petpla.net 23 Components However, it is not just packaging that is affected as component suppliers are also having to reposition them- selves in the USA. In the rst list, China has put agricultural products on the index, many of which are vital for drinks’ production. Farmers have to plan for the long term, particularly as regards perennial fruits. A collapse in the Chi- nese market would signicantly reduce vital income which cannot be made good very quickly by new sales mar- kets. Fruit farmers are already under enormous public pressure as it is. Most fruit is grown in areas where water has been scarce for years. Households are obliged to save considerable amounts of water while farmers water their desert crops. This high consumption of water by farmers is attracting a lot of criticism from the public. The farmers ght their corner with slogans such as “No farms, no food” in order to win over the popula- tion. So it should only be a matter of time before the fruit markets begins to shift dramatically. Environmental awareness There is also trouble on the con- sumer side. While Trump does not care about the environment, having implied in a tweet on 6 November 2012 that global warming was a hoax created by and for the Chinese, designed to damage the U.S. econ- omy, an “anti-plastics” movement has emerged among U.S. end-users. The plastic bag has become the symbol of environmental pollution to the con- sumer with around 100 billion of bags having been used in 2017. Disposable bags have been banned in several Californian cities. The U.S. drinks market will need to be careful that the huge quantities of plastic bottles which are routinely dis- carded in the countryside do not lead to anti-PET sentiments. PET recycling in the USA is shamefully low at 31%. Market gures The fact that, according to Euro- monitor, the drinks’ market has grown by around 2% per year in recent times to 211 billion packages, of which 89 billion are PET bottles, 92 billion bot- tles made from polyolen and 86 bil- lion cans (2013-2016, later gures are not available) means that all forecasts have become out of date. It is doubtful whether the 650 drinks packages per head in the USA in 2016 will remain at that level in 2018. The gure of 310 plastic bags per person should certainly be lower this year. The bottlers Ultimately, everything ends up with the bottlers. Higher packaging materi- als and component prices, a ruinous price war that has been going on for years and an increasingly critical public attitude towards plastics will not be without its consequences. If similar phenomena were to prevail in other markets (higher commodity prices, shrinking margins) this would lead to supplier concentration and con- solidation with the big players gaining further scale. The medium-sized con- cerns will nd it increasingly difcult to consider this. As well as the very large enterprises, such a time is also an opportunity for the very small rms who are exible in their approach and have a clear idea of how to overcome the many stumbling blocks to provide a nancially strong target group with innovative products. On the rst part of our tour, we visited Rivera Bever- ages and Bomatic from the “small but beautiful” group, both of which are based in California (p. 28 and 29). It is to be hoped that the upturn will not stie the U.S. economy which has been in recession for many years.