With more than half the financial year gone, it’s time to do a reality check on our forecast of commercial print capacity creation, published in late August. Although the book printing side of the industry is robust and has received a boost from the government’s announcement that it will triple the production of NCERT textbooks from 5 crore copies to 15 crore, the number of offset machines installed is not currently keeping pace with our prediction of 50 presses by March.
While multicolor offset installations are more likely to reach 40 to 45 new presses this year, including three new 8-color perfectors, these are increasingly coming to the smaller cities and not the traditional metros and state capitals as in the past. There are 20 cities in India with a population of more than 2 million each, and another 35 with populations of more than one million. New and efficient offset color capacities are coming to cities such as Agra, Meerut, Sonepat, Hathras, Karnal, Coimbatore, Kakinada, Vijayawada, and Mangalore. Regional publishers and printers are building their capacities as they decrease their reliance on the big cities and used presses.
While some publishers and printers seem to have robust orders on hand, others point to a lull in the book printing market over the past four months. They say the rush of seasonal textbook orders that should have been received by now, has not happened. Paper prices that should be buoyant are also benign, with mills ready to offer discounts and special deals for bulk orders.
Another feature of the current commercial print market is that with the new presses being installed, there seems to be a shortage of skilled resources. Instead of a methodical program of in-house training and internal skilling, printers are resorting to a desperate type of poaching where trained press persons can resign abruptly by eMail or WhatsApp any morning, ready to forego all notice periods and industrial norms.
Printers who are buying new multicolor presses should realize that apart from the week-long or 10-day operator training at installation, the manufacturers offer subsequent 10-day training packages at approximately Rs 2 lakh. This is a reasonably priced opportunity for in–house skilling to ensure the quality and productivity of a new capital asset.
Digital drum and toner print remains strong despite the influx of inkjet web presses
Our previous forecast of more than two dozen web-fed inkjet presses continues to have merit. Since April, about fifteen 4-color and monochrome digital webfed presses have already been installed as of the last week of October, with a similar number likely to be added before 31 March 2024. Monotech, and Atexco, are likely to lead this market with about ten installations each, followed by Founders, Miyakoshi, and Spande.
As far as the drum and toner digital production presses, the Indian installations in the region of 2800, will be similar to or slightly higher than last year’s total market, including light production and monochrome machines. There is an increase in the types of production printers with the addition of several light and very light production color and monochrome models from established manufacturers and the entry of several new players.
Konica Minolta is again likely to lead the sales and installation numbers by end-March – with nearly 50% of the market share, although as the market expands there may be a slight erosion of its dominant numbers. Canon and Ricoh are fighting for the second and third places with Xerox in fourth place, Fujifilm in fifth, and HP in the sixth position. Newer entrants in our market such as Kyocera, Sharp, and Riso could perhaps make up 5% of the installations in this financial year. (These numbers do not include the digital label presses, which we will discuss in a separate article on packaging and label capacity creation in Packaging South Asia.)
Thus the digital web-fed presses do not seem to have taken away sales from the drum and toner production presses. However, for the well–established players in the digital press category in India, such as Konica Minolta, Canon, Ricoh, and Fuji – all of whom have digital inkjet presses, the opportunity to sell a substantial number of web-fed inkjet presses into the Indian market seems to have been missed because of the steep capital cost of their current offerings. In this currently flourishing category, especially among book printers, the Japanese Miyakoshi, the Indian-built Monotech, and the Chinese Atexco, Founders, and Spande have leaped ahead in the race.
This article has been slightly modified on 20 November 2024 for purposes of clarity by the author. None of the numbers have been changed. – Editor)
