Marc Meersschaut had been eagerly looking forward to Glassman Latin America for weeks. After almost three years of forced abstinence, no direct contact and no face-to-face encounters, his Spanish was starting to get a bit rusty. And now the waiting was finally over! Stephan Pies, Head of Sales at futronic, accompanied him for the first time to Glassman in Monterrey, a city in north-east Mexico and the venue for this year’s exhibition and conference – a mark of Glassman’s importance for futronic.
 
Rising demand for glass packaging
“South and Central America play a crucial role for us”, Meersschaut explains. They’re his speciality and he knows them well. “It’s a region where the glass market is growing rapidly and demand for glass packaging, particularly in the food and beverage industry, has picked up enormously”, he adds. As a trained sales engineer, he regards that as a good sign: he’s confident that, as elsewhere, eco-friendly glass packaging will increasingly replace plastic in South and Central America over the next few years. As a result, many companies are facing major investments in new projects to expand their capacity, modernise their existing equipment and build new production lines or even entire factories.
 
Back on track
This is especially true of the Mexican market: “The local container glass industry is back on track after two years of pandemic and they’re really getting into gear”, Pies comments. “A lot of projects that were put on hold are now back on the agenda again and new ones are being launched as well. We want to position ourselves in good time here with our technology and our know-how.”
 
Inspiring person-to-person exchanges
Glassman Latin America was exactly the right platform to address these issues. A chance for a “family get-together”, a rendezvous with old acquaintances, new contacts and inspiring person-to-person exchanges – precisely what seasoned salespeople like Marc Meersschaut and Stephan Pies thrive on. And they had a very busy time there: the organisers welcomed more than 1300 visitors in total to the conference and exhibition, mainly from Mexico, the US, Colombia and Paraguay. Nearly 90 leading manufacturers and service providers, for example from Turkey, Italy, France, Poland and the UK, not forgetting Mexico and Germany, turned up to exhibit.
 
Keen interest in standalone solutions for the hot end
There was a buzz of activity in the aisles, and the futronic booth was no exception. “We’re really happy”, says Meersschaut. “We had a number of good and highly promising conversations.” He reports that standalone solutions for the hot end, such as the new VCS and VPC reject systems or SCMS, the swab cycle monitoring system, met with particular interest. “I’m very hopeful that one or the other project will materialise in the near future.” At any rate, the follow-up work is well under way in the meantime. And Meersschaut is already back on the road again in South America after a brief