Corrugated 2026, held alongside FESPA Global Print Expo in Barcelona in May, laid out the pressures facing the sector: a crowded market, tighter margins, stricter regulation, and a shrinking pool of skilled workers. Any one of those would demand a response. Together they are forcing converters to rethink how production is planned.
The capacity problem
Capacity built during the 2020-2021 e-commerce surge now exceeds demand. Christian Vionnet, product marketing director at BOBST, framed it as a structural imbalance: utilization rates and margins are squeezed, and future competitiveness depends less on plant size than on the ability to adapt. The four capabilities he named, integration, agility, automation, and precision, point away from scale and toward responsiveness.






