AT Inks showcased its digital ink products at the 50th edition of MediaExpo, held from 2 to 4 March at the Bombay Exhibition Center in Mumbai. Based in Vadodara, a two-hour drive from Ahmedabad in Gujarat, Rex-tone Industries is India’s first and largest manufacturer of digital inks. With four manufacturing plants spanning 55,000 square meters in the city, it produces solvent-based, eco-solvent, and mild-solvent inks, UV and LED inks, water-based dye sublimation and water-based reactive inks under its AT Inks brand. The company offers inks that customers can use on their machines and provide color in different applications such as signage, vinyls, and banners.
The company’s UV inks work on multiple substrates such as polycarbonate, wood, PVC, MDF, glass, acrylic, and wallpaper. It produces inks for various printheads such as Xaar, Spectra, Seiko, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Epson, Memjet, Ricoh, and thermal printheads. “Any printhead you name in the market, we have a product for that. Signage is our core business. We are in industrial applications where products are being used for industrial printing, including paper,” said Neerav Goswamy, director at AT Inks.
The ink industry in India is starting to mature and learning how to differentiate between products, he said. “Customers need to understand that an ink is not just a simple formulation – it is a challenging product that has to fulfill a number of requirements before it comes to them.”
Rex-tone supplies its branded AT Inks to 38 countries. According to Goswamy, AT Inks is the largest in the world for solvent-based inkjet inks and the only one in India manufacturing UV inkjet inks. “We have been a pioneer in the ink industry, offering products that are suited for the printer and the print head that they are working with. We offer customers the color balance that they are looking for. We provide them with color that suits the palette of India, which is not normally available with ink providers from abroad. In India, people like warmer reds: dark red or dark purple is a preferred color tone, not usually available with all ink tones. We specialize in that,” he told Indian Printer & Publisher.
“Customers, in general, in India are very intelligent. They value a good product but are always out there for a bargain. The economics sometimes overplays quality, which should not be the case. We, as printers, need to understand that the focus should be on quality. Price is important but it should not be the only thing; they should always look at the quality of the product and balance it out with the price,” he said.
Rex-tone Industries is growing and doing newer things to engage with potential customers. “We have just introduced thermoforming and vacuum-forming inks. We are working with many other products such as water-based pigmented inks. We are working on wallpaper-pigmented inks and laminate paper inks on the industrial application side. Dye sublimation is a big area for growth. A lot of growth has been planned for the near future,” Goswamy said on the company’s expansion plans.
