Despite being fraught with the day-to-day difficulties of running printing operations in a country where there is actually very little ease of doing business, the Indian commercial, book printing, and packaging industry is building capacities. While in packaging, there is a more consistent rate of purchases of large presses over longer lead times, the commercial printers are more uncertain in their decision-making and more dependent on seasonal demands and their access to capital.
Some of the optimism of April among the commercial printers is already evaporating since May and June are considered lean periods. The mismatch in GST input costs of such presses and raw material and the GST on print output are a further impediment. The revised minimum wage in April in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh is also a challenge, although the bigger challenge is finding and holding on to trained manpower.
The US-Israeli war on Iran has added to energy, chemical and ink costs. For commercial and book printers, the fluctuations in paper and board prices have become normal, and they are gradually accommodating the rise of raw material prices without drastic increases in the final costs to their domestic and export clients.
The commercial offset print market is dominated by government and private textbooks, while general trade book runs have multiplied in the number of titles with shorter runs. The book printing exporter cohort has increased and grown beyond the Frankfurt, London, and Bologna book fairs.
Despite these challenges, the global offset print equipment manufacturers, with at least 20 installed in the first quarter from April to June by Heidelberg, Komori and RMGT, seem fairly optimistic. K&B, which is only expecting sales in the packaging market, is sitting on a very solid order book with installation likely of about a dozen or slightly more offset packaging presses and a pair of metal printing presses.
Including the possibility of two or three 8-color perfectors and more than forty 4- and 5-color offset presses, the total installations before 31 March are likely to be between 40 and 50 as per our current guesstimate. In addition to this segment, drum and toner digital presses and webfed inkjet press installations for book printing are also growing. Apart from the commercial segment, more than 30 highly configured 6- and 7-color coater presses are likely to be added for packaging in FY 26-27.
In speaking with industry insiders, suppliers and practitioners over the past week, we gather that the commercial, book printing, and industry remains resilient. While many commercial printers have diversified into packaging operations, several others have come up with additional plants or operations.
Though hyper-competition pertaining to printing rates and order delivery times has increased in the big cities, there has been an aspirational increase in offset press installations in tier-II and tier-III cities in the last few years. Multicolor offset capacity of generally 4-color and at times 5-color plus coater presses is growing in tier-II and tier-III cities in all geographies. Cities such as Agra, Jammu, Jaipur, Kochi, Lucknow, Rajkot, Haridwar, Karnal, Meerut, Thiruvananthapuram, Tiruppur, Sonepat, Guwahati, Nashik, Baddi, Surat, and Vadodara have seen an increasing number of offset press installations over the last few years.
Many newspapers are already in book printing, including Impressions by Amar Ujala in Jammu, Hindustan Times in Greater Noida and Mathrubhumi in Kerala, with several others looking to invest in the book printing segment. The news publishers are also setting up packaging plants.
The Indian packaging industry, too, is witnessing a push with many traditional family-owned print businesses investing in carton plants or on the lookout for land for setting up new plants. New packaging converters have come up recently in Agra, Ghiloth, Baddi, Indore, and Haridwar in the north, and in Guwahati and Kolkata in the east. “The packaging industry is one of the most resilient in India,” according to several packaging converters we interacted with over the course of the last year. The western and southern parts of the subcontinent have been packaging hotspots for a long time, with a huge concentration of packaging plants in industrial areas of big cities, including Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Indore, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad.
