We again met with VK Gulati of Saurabh Printers at the company’s plant in Kasna, Greater Noida, to discuss its further investments in Indian–manufactured Knowzzlejet web-fed inkjet presses.
The printing plant, which employs 14 people in the office area and 150 on the production floor, is spread across 72,000 square feet on a 1.5-acre plot of land. The location has become strategic with several publishers’ warehouses having relocated nearby. The company, which has an annual turnover of more than Rs 50 crore, produces 450,000 books copies monthly that are considered medium to long runs and 24,000 copies of books that are in the short-run category.
The company is a print partner for leading textbook publishers such as Scholastic India, Reed Elsevier, and Tata McGraw Hill. It is empanelled by HarperCollins India, Rupa Publications, Oxford University Press, Kalyani Publishers, and Taxmann Books. Saurabh Printers has diversified into warehousing with its book storage and delivery facility in Okhla and is the transport and logistics partner of Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters for these services.
While many other book printers focussed on producing paperbacks, Saurabh Printers was a pioneer in producing digitally printed hardcover books in India originally on its Xerox machines. In 2019, Gulati attended the PrintPack exhibition where Monotech showcased its Knowzzlejet inkjet press together machine with Pressline and Bindwel. He took an instant liking to the machine and Mamta Negi, a member of the board of directors at Saurabh Printers, asked or persuaded Gulati to invest in the inkjet book press.
At the time, there were few inkjet machine users in the book printing industry. Saurabh Printers became the first printer to acquire the Knowzzlejet machine designed and developed in India by Monotech – in association with Jetsci and Pressline.
The next year, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Gulati’s elder brother Gulati suggested the addition of a folding and gathering machine together with the Knowzzlejet to give a better or more complete solution to publishers. For the next six months, Monotech, Pressline, Harish Gulati, and Mamta Negi worked together on the Knowzzlejet to make this suggestion a reality and suggested some useful modifications to meet its specific book printing criteria.
In 2021, Gulati introduced this cooperatively developed digital book printing system to the wider book printing market. “We started adding more publishers after word spread that we were the only book printer using an inkjet machine. Seventy percent of our book production capacity is on the Monotech Knowzzlejet,” he says.
In 2023, the company decided to opt for more inkjet book presses. “Monotech was providing satisfactory service and we decided to get more inkjet presses from them. Monotech has assisted us with service even in late night hours,” Gulati explains. Saurabh Printers ordered two more Monotech inkjet printing presses at drupa24 – a monochrome M660 and a 4-color C660 inkjet press.
After consultation with Harish and Mamta, VK decided to go for a 65-centimeter-wide solution rather than the initially planned 45-cm press. “In another 4-5 years, I feel that monochrome offset machines will become obsolete and all such work will be driven by the Knowzzlejet,” he says. Commenting on the market, Gulati adds, “We anticipate growth in short print runs, with many European publishers shifting production from China to India. As a result, we see a promising future for the book printing industry in India.”
Saurabh’s plant and infrastructure have been built under the guidance of Harish Gulati, often referred to as the backbone of the company. According to him, with the Monotech digital webfed inkjet presses, “One has the printed book in your hands immediately unlike steps such as platemaking for offset presses where it takes as long as 72 hours to produce a finished and bound book. This is the primary reason I insisted on the inkjet Knowzzlejet presses.”
Mamta Negi says that before the inkjet technology was introduced in the plant in 2019, it was using a combination of sheetfed offset sheetfed and sheetfed drum and toner digital presses for printing. “When we joined hands with Amazon and Flipkart in 2021, we observed that the process of making a complete book took 72 hours with sheetfed offset, while we can do this in two hours with web-fed digital inkjet technology with the Mejmjet printheads enabling a smooth print quality. We decided to go for more Monotech Knowzzlejet presses after experiencing their superior quality and reliable service. Both the new monochrome and 4-color presses will be installed by the end of this month,” she says.
The Saku Group belonging to Saurabh Printers has a printing and packaging division named Westman Press in Australia which produces flexible packaging material and glass packaging. Gulati plans to diversify to the customized flexible packaging segment in the company’s Indian operations as well.
