In an early stage not long after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, manual cartoning was mainly adopted for packaging in medicine production. With the development of production and the advancement of technology, however, mechanical cartoning has gradually become the order of the day. The earliest automatic Cartoning Machines used in China were mainly imported from abroad. For a very long period, China had to abandon the automatic cartoning but pick up manual approaches again in pharmaceutical production, which demonstrated extremely low efficiency. Since the 1980s, especially after the reform and opening-up, relevant technologies of China’s pharmaceutical industry have boosted, making possible substantial progress in terms of the quality of the medicine packaging materials and medicine cartoning manufacturing technologies, with nationwide application of and the automatic cartoning machine. At this time, the domination of foreign-made automatic Cartoning Machines has been history, with domestic-manufactured ones making their debut on the market and starting occupying market shares. At the end of the 1990s, some enterprises with large medicine production have started to replace manual packaging for domestic-manufactured automatic Cartoning Machine. To follow the trend, pharmaceuticals and enterprises involved began researching, developing and producing new automatic medicine Cartoning Machines with greater and more comprehensive functions. Utilizing proper materials or containers, automatic Cartoning Machine applies packaging technology to conduct such operations as sealing, loading, and labeling on the semi-finished or finished pharmaceutical preparations. They help provide quality assurance, identification trademark and description for medicines, and further offer protection for medicines, facilitating the application and commodity promotion. Recent years saw continuous development of a stronger pharmaceutical industry in China, promoting the increase of numbers and varieties of medicine and the larger categories of the pharmaceutical dosage, and better quality of products manufactured by major pharmaceutical factories.
Naturally, the requirements for medicine packaging, especially for automatic cartoning machines became higher and higher; and all kinds of multi-functional automatic cartoning machine have begun to be used by medicine enterprises gradually.
Domestic cartoning machine with a huge variety and quantity
At present, domestic-manufactured medicine automatic cartoning machines feature a great variety and quantity, which will satisfy the packaging needs of different types of medicines manufactured by domestic medicine manufacturers. According to different classification approaches, domestic-manufactured medicine automatic cartoning machine can be divided into several categories. Based on different packaging materials, the automatic cartoning machine can be divided into blister plate, injections and ointments type, etc.; according to the running speed, the automatic cartoning machine can be classified as mid- and low-speed type with the speed of about 60-80 carton/min, mid- and high-speed type, with the speed of about 80~120 cartons/min and high- speed type that handles more than 150 cartons/min. Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages, and their functions differ from each other. Currently, when compared with that of similar products in Germany, Italy and other countries, the technical content of the products of famous manufacturers of domestic medicine automatic cartoning machine can be found with the following problems:
In terms of market share, domestic-manufactured medicine automatic cartoning machines occupy only about 30% of the market. They need a long way to become leaders of the mid- and low-end market, let alone the rest of the market that is devoured by imported products.
The function needs to be improved. At present, many domestic larger-scale pharmaceuticals mainly adopt imported medicine automatic cartoning machine. The main reason for this phenomenon is that the comprehensive performance of domestic-manufactured medicine automatic cartoning machine cannot meet the requirement of medicine manufacturers.
However, with the increasing home technology, especially the innovation development in recent years, a qualitative change exists beneath the iceberg. It is predicted that around 2016 China’s cartoning machine will hopefully be up to the international advanced standards.
25/7/2013