At the Print Miracle Expo 2014 in Kochi, Mahesh Panchal, marketing manager (international), Panchal said that the Ahmedabad-based Line O Matic, a major paper converting and exercise notebook machinery manufacturer, is now exporting its products to over 50 countries including the UK and France. Moreover, it has been able to make a breakthrough in the East European markets of Uzbekistan and Romania last year.
The company participated in the Expo Print Latin America show held at Brazil from 16 to 22 July 2014. “It was the first time Line O Matic participated in this show. The company exhibited its products along with video displays of the working machinery and received an extremely good response with nearly 50 enquiries,” says Panchal.
Line O Matic is engaged in the manufacturing of manual, semiautomatic, and fully automatic book production lines and has nearly 80% market share of the domestic exercise book market. It manufactures central sewn book making machines, automatic exercise book binding machines, exercise book binding machines, automatic central sewing book binding machines, automatic reel to sheet high speed ruling, flexo printing, automatic reel to pile ruling, automatic book cutting, counting, folding and binding machines.
The basic book binding machine is semi-automatic and produces softcover exercise books. This staple pin type exercise notebook consists of manual bunch feeding table, wire stitching unit, folding unit, square back pressing unit, book front cutting unit, book separating cutting unit and book delivery unit. The fully automatic exercise book machine consists of a shaftless reel unwinding stand, a ruling and flexo printing tower, cross cutting unit, a sheet overlapping unit, a sheet counting and collating unit, one inserter for preprinted index sheets and another inserter for pre-printed title covers, a wire stitching unit, folding unit, square back pressing unit, front cutting unit, book separating cutting unit, book delivery table, waste removal system and a centralized control panel (PLC).
“Two thirds of our sales are of semiautomatic machines and are sold to the small and unorganized sector. They are machines in the range of Rs 30 to Rs 60 lakhs. These machines have the capacity to produce 20,000 to 30,000 exercise notebooks a day. The bigger automatic machines are bought only by major convertors like ITC or Navneet or are exported,” says Panchal. “We are shortly going to launch the Apex model which will be an automatic book binding machine producing glue bound note-books.
