Wolfgang Hiesiger, senior product manager Newspaper & Packaging Systems shows us the test chart of flexible materials printed on the Varioman at the manroland Goss stand at Print4All in Milan Photo Packaging South Asia
manroland Goss web systems known for its web offset newspaper press installations in India will again be at the Printpack India 2022 exhibition in Greater Noida. Although the company mainly sells and services its double-width presses in the country installed by several of the bigger newspaper groups in the country, for the past several years the focus has to some extent, shifted to engineering services, maintenance and relocation of presses and units. Its most recent installation of a new press was that of the Cromoman to Bartaman in Kolkata in 2019.
Rekha Sharma, marketing manager, manroland Goss, says, “Printcom consumables and service solutions will be a highlight at Printpack India 2022. We expect this show to be a wonderful forum for the printing industry and feel that we will be able to generate interest in our solutions for packaging printing customers.”
In recent years the company has developed its Varioman series of packaging presses that it hopes to talk about with Indian customers who are now looking at the burgeoning growth of this segment in India. As Sudeep Bhattacharjee, managing director of manroland Goss India, explained to us in his Noida office and as we also learned at Print4All in Milan in the early part of May, the Varioman packaging presses which are a hybrid of offset and other technologies such as gravure have found customers in both flexible packaging and cartons segments in Europe and North America. The Varioman series is presented in three types of configurations known as the F-line, B-line, and C-line.
As Bhattacharjee explained to us, the Varioman F-line is for flexible packaging, whereas the C-line is for card printing and both are mainly sold in the European market currently. The F-line can print on films and C-line is for the thicker substrates.
At Print4All in Milan, we also learned that one of the Varioman’s first customers has purchased its second such machine. We saw the high-quality samples of test charts printed on flexible materials and thin-flute printed pizza boxes produced on the Varioman for the high volume frozen pizza market that is growing well in most markets, including India.
This story contains inputs from Pallavi Choudhary.
Note: The IPPGroup will be publishing the PrintPack India Show Daily on all five days of the event from 26 to 30 May 2022. Our May issues of Indian Printer and Publisher and Packaging South Asia will also contain previews of the event.
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.
