Emidio Di Meo, president of leading plastic bottles and containers manufacturer Silgan Plastics Canada Inc. in Woodbridge, Ont., suggested that a lot of the carnage taking place in the manufacturing industry right now can be traced back to the many companies’ over reliance on the traditionally low Canadian dollar versus the U.S. currency—leaving themselves highly vulnerable to last year’s surge of the Canadian dollar to near-parity with its U.S. counterpart.
Said Di Meo: “In the short term, there’s going to be a lot of pain because for a long time, a lot of Canadian manufacturing companies have hidden behind the exchange rate as a way of competing in the global marketplace, and you just can’t do that.
“For all those companies that have not used the exchange rate this way, they’re still going to be around in the future because if you position yourself as the leader in your market, there are always going to be opportunities for you,” Di Meo added. “It’s all about being able to position yourself so that once the tsunami goes, you will still be the one supplying the product to the marketplace.
“Historically, there have always been these huge, extreme pendulum shifts,” Di Meo pointed out. “If you go back 20 years, everything to do with manufacturing was supposed to move to Mexico and guess what, it did not. Now it’s supposed to be all happening for China and guess what, it is not.
“I just came back from Asia last year,” he related, “and over there it’s now Vietnam being talked about as the next hot area of growth, because the labor costs are getting too high in China.
“So with all of these dynamics going on globally, I think it is important to consider the long-term picture,” Di Meo asserted. “The opportunities will still be there for us, but we must never again use the exchange rate as a way to compete.”
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It is often said that of all the packagin
g suppliers, corrugated producers are arguably in the best position to get a good feel for how the economy is doing at the moment, and the insights offered by the Atlantic Packaging Products Ltd. president John Cherry do not offer much support for the nation of a quick fix to the current economic woes on either side of the Canada-U.S. border.
Over the last couple of years, “we got impacted negatively in two ways,” lamented Cherry, whose privately-owned company operates more than 25 manufacturing and distribution facilities strategically located throughout North America—producing corrugated and solid-fiber boxes, coated paperbags and some flexible packaging products.
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