The venerable TPH Orient known as a manufacturer of web offset presses showed its newer machinery at Pamex comprising consumables, a folder gluer and a duplex inkjet digital press at Pamex 2023 in Mumbai. Rishabh Kohli, managing director of the company said, “We’re glad to be a part of Pamex 2023, having launched new products for the packaging and commercial print industry, this exhibition provided us with a very good opportunity to showcase our innovations. In our group of companies we are developing five businesses – manufacturing components for defence and aerospace, full solar panels, printing presses, and converting equipment such as the folder gluers on show to start with. The fifth business is of consumables such as press room chemicals.”
The packaging and converting vertical is the latest addition to the company’s portfolio. Kohli said, “We weren’t able to display our converting vertical at PrintPack so we had our eyes set on Pamex to display our latest breakthroughs. Currently, we are the only Indian company that actually manufactures folder-gluers in the country. Others are mainly assembling Chinese machines, or in one case a subsidiary of a European company produces folder gluers at its plant in India. Our folder gluers are designed to compete with the fastest and we are keen to show our engineering and technology are on par with our European counterparts.”
Folder Gluer from the packaging vertical of TPH Orient. Photo PSAAt its stand at Pamex, TPH also showed a running duplex inkjet book printing press for the commercial industry that is yet to be launched. Kohli claims that the return on investment is much faster than that of competitors’ digital presses. “Compared to the Indian machines and even some European brands our economics and engineering fares better because of our experience in various verticals. The design of the machine also makes a good impression to visitors to our stand since we pay attention to the looks and finish of our machines. This press will be available in 4-color, 6-color, and 8-color variants and easily feeds into our existing customer base for web-offset book printing.”
According to Kohli, although there are narrow web flexo press suppliers in India there’s no local manufacturer who supplies mid-web and wide-format flexo presses giving his company an edge in the market, “We wanted to showcase our range of flexo presses at PrintPack, but they were not ready to be shown so we just introduced the concept. The planned range will include several widths and configurations specially designed for film and paper packaging.”
Pamex was just an opportunity for TPH to showcase the strength of domestic manufacturing, “India has a huge infrastructure and an even greater market, yet we are selling machines made by others,” Kohli said, “The Indian packaging industry is great but it is relying on trading and imports too heavily. Through our new range of products, we are not thinking only of scaling our business but also of the growth of the Indian market as a whole. We hope that by presenting our machines here we were able to take a step ahead in making the Indian manufacturers more self-reliant.”
