Started in 1975, Meerut’s SK Offset is an established book and commercial printer producing a variety of print products. The company also diversified to packaging print and converting.
The K to 6 school owners in the area depends mostly on the Montessori model and books that are geared for this type of primary education. Ayush Agarwal, director, SK Offset says, “We mainly produce books for Montessori primary schools books. However, we are a vendor to NCERT for the past 20 years and also print their books.”
The nearly 50-year-old company has a complete set of special machines that go along with book printing, finishing, and binding. It has a Heidelberg SM102 8-color, and a HP Indigo 7-color digital press and a Kodak Trendsetter CtP in its prepress department. It has the complement of folding and binding equipment including a Well Bound 6-clamp perfect binder and a saddle stitcher, a wire-o-binder, and a three-knife trimmer.
“We have all the in-house manufacturing processes for printing, title printing, title lamination, book binding for perfect binding, center stitching, and packaging. We also provide special effects like UV coating,” said Agarwal.
For the monocarton section developed in the past two years, SK Offset has a laminator, an autoplaten Bobst SP 102E diecutter, Vesta folder gluer, Yawa TYML hot foiling and various ancillary equipment. The company also has a corrugator and a Tunkers Vorwearts 1450 automatic flute laminator for producing micro-flute litho-laminated and corrugated. For its packaging vertical, the company has now begun a new subsidiary called Pixel Print and Pack.
The company manufactures all types of paper-related packaging, including labels, stickers, mono-cartons, litho laminated, and corrugated cartons. It supplies packaging and labels to the local sports equipment as well as to pharma, food, and FMCG brands.
Heidelberg-Gallus EM340S 9-color label press arrives
Pixel Print and Pack has now undertaken further diversification to label production. Its pre-owned Heidelberg Gallus EM340-13S narrow web flexo 9-color press has already arrived in Meerut and should be installed by the end of July 2022. Together with it, a Comco Cadet 170 5-color label press and slitter-rewinder are also being installed in the new label section.
The company diversified its business because of the Covid-19 crisis. “During the covid pandemic, many commercial printers and publishers shut their businesses because the schools were closed. We diversified our business in packaging as a backup plan. The Covid restrictions are diminishing and the economy is opening up, and the printing industry is booming again. We are now flooded with book printing orders and doing both book printing and binding as well as packaging print and converting.” said Agarwal.
SK Offset took part in the recently concluded India’s PrintPack India 2022 exhibition in Greater Noida which is an approximately a 90-minute drive from Meerut. At this extremely well-attended exhibition with the exhibitors showing highly automated and sophisticated equipment, the company looked for the special folding machines required by the pharma industry.
(On 21 June 2022 at 11:23 am, this article has been corrected for a factual error in the earlier version, which mistakenly described the to be installed Gallus label press as new. Subsequently there has been a second factual error corrected on 23 June 2022. – Editor.)
