News reaches us in the end of August that Ricoh Pro C5300S digital press has been installed at Jaipur-based Redray Global. Redray is a 16-year-old printing business specializing in packaging and related work. It is run by CEO Nishant Sethi, while his father Kailash Jain looks after procurment and his Juhee Jain manages the workflow processes. Sethi works on sales. The new Ricoh digital press has been installed by Monotech System which recently signed up with Ricoh APAC for the distribution of its digital presses in India.
Sethi says the demand for digital print in packaging related printing has been rising, “With the rise of eCommerce, budding entrepreneurs are trying to develop their product lines with an initial demand of fewer quantities of packaging material which can be achieved easily in digital. We have also shifted most of our short-run jobs to the Ricoh Pro C5300S,” he said.
The company is using the machine only in-house production for its own clients, and avoiding outside job work. “We do exclusive work related to sampling, packaging, labelling and some other unique products that we offer. With so many brands now offering production printers, there has been a price war in the job work market with refurbished lines. But investing in a new machine always keeps gives us an edge over others,” he said.
On choosing Ricoh, he added, “We had done a little bit of homework on Ricoh’s quality standards and were waiting for it to come back to India after a long break. Since our focus is not the usual commercial printing, adopting Ricoh was not a tough decision. We have got what we wanted in terms of price, quality and service.”
Along with the Ricoh, the company has also installed a Roland 640i for print and cut labels, a digital die-cutter for short-run shaped label jobs, and an automatic rigid box-making machine with an auto-gluer, side-pasting and a grooving machine.
Sethi said there has been a remarkable shift in production efficiency and delivery deadlines since the installation. “We have also seen a shift in customer satisfaction with the better quality delivered. Also, 350-gsm duplex printing has enabled us to increase our media usage, thus offering more options to our clients,” he said.
2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India
Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and
multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.
The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry.
While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately
their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book
printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.
The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.
Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.
Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.
Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.
