Malcolm Rae is the winner of this year’s Label Industry’s Global Achievement Award. Each year, the award recognizes an individual who has made a key contribution to the promotion and growth of the label industry and who is a high-profile industry influencer and motivator. 

“Malcolm Rae is a worthy winner of the Global Achievement Award. This recognizes his unique contribution, through GEW, the company he founded, to the narrow web industry’s transition to UV curing and to the subsequent technological development of the UV curing industry,” said the judging panel of the Label Awards.

Rae founded GEW in March 1991, creating what was to become the largest supplier of UV curing equipment to the narrow web label industry worldwide. A chartered mechanical engineer, Rae holds 21 international patents covering GEW's key products, including the ubiquitous E2C, which is installed on 30,000 label print stations globally.

Over a 35-year career, Rae helped enable the transformation of label printing from primarily water-based to majority UV ink. His inventions led to the commercialization of many UV technologies such as UV cassettes, electronic power supplies, and exclusively air-cooled lamps. More recently, Rae steered GEW towards a focus on UV-LED curing, making the lamps exchangeable with arc UV lamps to help converters make the transition to UV-LED technology.

To learn more, visit www.gewuv.com and www.labelawards.com.