2014 Hot Markets: Packaging, Pharma Head List

Concurrently, health insurance providers are, and will be, feverously heating up their digital in-plants as they notify, terminate and re-direct the least healthy to German-style krankenkassen "exchanges." VDP letter-format and carrier-mount cards will be on steroids.

Personal Care ($406B, +4 percent; with $5.3B to print, -11 percent) will slip to No. 18. Color cosmetics, hair and skin care have long been at saturation, and big names like Estée Lauder and Revlon are slashing ad budgets, but keeping in-store displays beautifully made-up. Avon now sells its catalogs to its reps while it will reduce the print spend by more than 1/3rd.

At retail, everyone is discounting and private labels are proliferating; the latter a small opportunity for label and carton plants. Pharmacies will be overwhelmed with prescriptions as a new, forcibly insured not-healthy portion of the population crawls or wheels its way through crowded aisles and around now-dangerous floor displays. Traffic-builder in-store signage, FSIs and other promo print will no longer be necessary; a killer prognosis for screen, large-format sheetfed and heatset web printers.

Publishing/Non-Newspaper ($75B, -4 percent; with $11.8B to print, 0 percent) at No. 4 is self-destructing as incompetent executives use new media as an excuse to scuttle print and pay themselves while their balance sheets shred to goodwill and intangibles. The Time Inc. spin-off and the sale of Forbes Media will show how little investors regard books and magazines even though global demand, especially for English-language print, is increasing. Only in the United States are titles, page revenues and circulation decreasing.

In professional/educational books (-6 percent) there's a tri-opoly (new word) that's herding educators and students into custom-content VSR and e-books by outrageously pricing static-bound versions or withdrawing them altogether. Oppositely, adult/children's trade titles are not being printed in sufficient quantities to be available anywhere except online, thus discouraging demand. Periodicals, trimmed in size, torn in page counts and cut in circulation, will be dumbing down content.