Located along the road opposite ESIC Model Hospital in Noida sector 22 is a small hub of commercial printers, providing printing services to college and school students and a few offices and corporations. These printers are mostly equipped with 4-color presses from Konica Minolta, monochrome and multi-function printers (MFPs) from Xerox and Canon, and refurbished offset presses from Komori, RMGT, or Chinese manufacturers.
During our visit, at one shop we noticed an old Ryobi 975, a single-color offset printing machine. These printers say they are barely making ends meet and most of them survive on additional services or businesses. At most shops, the operators or managers were willing to take up any job that comes their way. They say the offset capacities are gathering dust and they had to let go of some of their staff in recent years.
The machines with these commercial printers are well maintained, the shop floors are decent, and the operators are familiar with the technical jargon. However, post-pandemic, short-run jobs or additional services are the only things providing fuel to their lamps.
According to an IMARC report, the India commercial printing market size reached US$ 34.5 billion in 2023. The group expects the market to reach US$ 45.3 Billion by 2032, exhibiting a growth rate (CAGR) of 3% during 2024-2032.
Bhagwati Printers
Established in 2005, Bhagwati Printers provides services such as color printouts, photo album printing, and framing, ID card printing, photostat, drawing maps, lamination, spiral binding, hard binding, project binding, thermal binding, and spico binding. Rohit Singh, partner at the printer, told Indian Printer & Publisher that low demand is a concern. Lamination, binding, and small orders keep the press operational.
“We have never thought of shutting the press. The workers have nowhere else to go. We have other retail businesses that help when printing demand is significantly low. However, there are good times too. Exams at nearby schools and colleges, and project works that involve binding and lamination is what we call ‘good season’. Exam notes of specific faculty sell out well. At times, we get students who would want to get a whole book monochrome-printed at the 11th hour.”
On repeat business that includes some large format printing on a Mutoh printer, he said, “We have rendered reliable and satisfactory services to our clients over the years such as Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, Ayesa Ingenieria Y Arquitectura SA, Yfc Project Noida, Aplinka Solutions & Technologies, Sterling and Wilson, Sterling and Willson Powergen, NKG Infra Structure (FDR), REPL Rudrabhishek Enterprises, ISGEC Heavy Engineering, NTPC Limited, Kalpataru Power Transmission SAM (India), Built Well, DGLL (Ministry of shipping), Central Bank of India, Employees Provident Fund Organization, and more.”
Sharma Cyber Cafe
Popularly known as Sharma Stationary or Sharma Photostat, the digital service provider utilizes digital presses from Canon and MFPs from Xerox. The provider, a jack of a few trades, prints photos in passport and postcard sizes, monochrome and color printouts and photostats, binding, and lamination with extra services such as typing in English or Hindi. Alongside, they run an eService portal for booking train tickets, flight tickets, applying for Adhaar cards, and all sorts of form-filling activities. And as the name suggests, the unit, which was established in 2011, has a cyber cafe business.
Although we were not able to meet the owner, we had a brief conversation with one of the machine operators, who also does menial tasks. “We have no volume. Printing constitutes a fairly small portion of the overall business. Before the pandemic, we were thinking of adding an offset press. However, we are glad we didn’t as achieving return on investment seems difficult now. We don’t know if there is any future in printing but it doesn’t impact our regular bread and butter,” he said.
A1 Printers
The five-year old facility is a multi-service provider, just like Sharma Cyber Cafe. It is equipped with MFPs from Epson and HP and a Canon 4-color digital press for custom jobs. Proprietor Rajesh Kumar says he is glad he did not include commercial printing in its services. “We knew that adding capacity for commercial printing would not be wise. We provide custom print jobs whenever a customer demands, but our major revenue is from IDs, Aadhar, license, and passport making, where we can get better service margins than commercial printing. Commercial printing is a very competitive market and many of my friends and well-wishers warned me against it.”
