Situated in Bengaluru’s Rajajinagar Industrial Estate, Dinesh Printers specializes in the printing of medicine cartons and labels. Owned by Dinesh Kundapur, the company employs 65 people across its 25,000 square foot plant. A first look at the plant leaves one mighty impressed owing to its immaculate cleanliness, neat storage of raw materials and well-groomed staff. Each press section is neatly labelled. There is also an administrative office and a dedicated canteen area for workers, which is still under construction.
Kundapur took us around his plant to help us gain an overview of his business. Dinesh Printers started as a small letterpress unit from Bashyam Circle in the year 1980. Kundapur was helped in setting up the unit by his brother Chandramohan Kundapur and brother-in-law Suresh Kundapoor. While the initial years were full of struggle, Dinesh Kundapur made a breakthrough in the year 1995, when he imported a used Mitsubishi 4-color offset press from Osaka, Japan. Since then, Dinesh Printers has never looked back. With growing volumes and rising demand from customers, Kundapur purchased a bigger area in Bengaluru’s printing hub, Rajajinagar Industrial Estate, from where the company currently operates.
As Dinesh Printers has become a leading supplier of pharmaceutical packaging, the plant has grown with a new RMGT 5-color plus coater sheetfed offset press, a Bobst autoplaten diecutter, a Bobst Ambition folder-gluer, a Kodak Trendsetter platesetter, a single-color offset sheetfed press, programmable cutting machines from Proteck and other ancillary machines for the converting and finishing section.
Kundapur says, “We do not have too much machinery in our unit but we do leverage whatever we have to the maximum. Today around 80% of our jobs are done in-house. We believe that one can do printing anywhere but it is the finishing part that is more important. So we ensure we have all the necessary equipment in our unit to offer best in class finishing.”
With a growing turnover, the company gets 90% of its business from packaging exports. “We export a lot of packaging materials to countries like Tanzania, Ghana, Nairobi and Ethiopia. Our major focus area is exports. Since we provide monocartons for pharmaceutical product companies, we ensure that we maintain the hygiene levels of our plant to the maximum,” Kundapur shares.
Talking about his future needs and expansion, Kundapur says, “We have purchased a 2-acre land in Tumkur, although we are yet to see whether there is a need for expansion or not. If at all the need arises, we will utilize that space for developing our second unit, which will be larger and will of course have state-of-the-art machinery. It, however, all depends on the market situation. We have to consider many aspects of the market and investments needed before we plan some kind of expansion. Right now, we are doing quite good and that’s what matters to us.”
Kundapur does not believe in the word ‘competition’. He firmly believes in offering the best services to his clients and adheres to commitments made to his clients in terms of quality and and timely completion of jobs. “This not only helps us give our best to the jobs but also instills a lot of confidence in our customers towards us,” he shares.
Nevertheless, Kundapur does have some acquisition plans in mind, the details of which he declined to share at this point in time. Moreover, if all goes well, he will be adding a new press to the unit. “It would be either an RMGT or a Heidelberg press. We haven’t yet decided which one to opt for. We are anyway very comfortable with RMGT – the people are good, the machines are good and there is no issue with post-sales service also. However, we still need to zero in on the brand,” he concludes.
