The pharmaceutical and medical device sector retains the strongest growth potential for packaging machinery sales in the United States, according to a purchasing plans study conducted by the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI).

The report forecasts the US pharmaceutical and medical device industries to increase their spending on packaging equipment for 2003 by 8-10 per cent

The study estimates the sector will spend $648 million on packaging machinery in 2003, 12.7 per cent of the total for all industries.

It identified healthcare as one of five growth sectors, the others being foods, beverages, personal care, and household chemicals. "Machinery manufacturers whose customers are concentrated in the five growth sectors should find business reasonably favorable this year," the report states.

Healthcare packaging equipment vendors and others who serve the growth segments "should be confident that they will have sales growth, based on this study," said Charles D. Yuska, PMMI's president. "Growth in these specific markets, combined with the fact that more than two-thirds of the overall respondents plan to keep up or increase their packaging machinery expenditures this year, is good news for packaging machinery manufacturers who have been seriously affected by the manufacturing recession over the past two years."

The study reported that 33 per cent of respondents plan to increase spending on packaging machinery in 2003, 34 per cent plan to spend about the same, 27 per cent plan to reduce spending, and 6 per cent made no purchases in 2002 and don't plan any in 2003. The study is based on interviews in January and February 2003 with 417 decision makers covering 1628 plants.

Factors contributing to projected growth include growth in the U.S. gross domestic product, improvements in capacity utilization, a desire to gain efficiency and productivity by replacing machinery, expansion of production capacity for existing products, adding machinery for automation or labor reduction, and new product additions.

Primary reasons for reducing new packaging machinery spending include the weak economy; war-related uncertainty; increasing use of used, rebuilt, and retrofitted machinery; heavy spending in 2002; beliefs that existing machinery is adequate; reductions in sales, profits, and budgets; and inability to justify capital spending.