With short-run and print on demand jobs clocking steady and robust growth, many traditional offset printers have entered the digital printing domain. Apart from first-time buyers of digital presses, there are many offset printers who have graduated to production level presses from their basic entry level digital set up.
One such print service provider is Just Print, owned by Ramesh Chamriya. Based in Mumbai’s Shah and Nahar Industrial Estate, the so called hub of offset printing in Mumbai, Just Print started off ten years ago as a pure offset printing house. Till about two years ago it used to outsource the digital print jobs. As volumes continued to grow, Chamriya bought an entry level Konica Minolta little less than two years ago to bring digital printing capabilities in-house. In late July this year, he bought Ricoh Pro c651 Ex, a production level press as a Konica Minolta press was insufficient to handle the consistently growing short-run and print on demand jobs.
“Although offset still corners a large proportion of our business, digital volumes have been steadily growing and now is about 20% of our volumes. With this kind of volumes, we had no choice but to go for a production level press. Having got a great feedback about Ricoh we decided to go for Pro c651 Ex. I am really happy with the quality and speed. However, the post sales service is a bit slack but Ricoh has assured that things will improve drastically in a couple of weeks,” he says.
Just Print had to move to a new and bigger premise to accommodate the Ricoh. It owns four separate units in Shah and Nahar with one unit housing the new Ricoh while two units are dedicated to offset printing operations and house a Heidelberg. The fourth unit has been rented out.
Further volume gains
Chamriya is confident that average daily print volumes of close to 2,000 impressions per day will be attained shortly. “In the very shortterm I expect to print about 60,000 impressions every month on the Ricoh. However, given the demand we are witnessing volumes could be much, much higher than that as we are working on acquiring few new and big contracts,” he says.
Just Print’s customer base is fully made up of corporate entities with Reliance, Godrej and Reliance Jio as main clients. For Reliance Jio, Just Print is currently doing wide format printing jobs but with the new Ricoh press Chamriya is confident he will be able to bag a contract for commercial jobs as well. Negotiations are on to bring Tata on board as well.
In order to have a backup a new Konica Minolta c6000 has also been ordered and will be installed by the end of August. “Ricoh will handle a major part of the work and the new Konica Minolta along with the old Konica Minolta will be there to provide backup,” Chamriya concludes.
