What has been the impact of Covid-19 on your business thus far?
My personal opinion is that the manufacturing units are not the losers in the real sense, as our manufacturing activities are stopped for some period and not forever. Once we resume, we will produce and supply to our buyers, the product being educational books. Yes, we have lost on account of wages and salaries for this period without working. The major loss is the interest, which never rests nor sleeps. Some of the debtors will take advantage of this situation and delay the payments. But that’s the general phenomena.

But the major impact would be settling the dues of bank before 31 March. The lockdown was 15 days prior to 31 March, the financial year-end, hence could not do any settlement of entries, such as transfer of funds from company to personal accounts and settlement of internal accounts’ entries of partners, etc.

The lockdown also means lose of one month of warranty period of machinery and AMC period. No manufacturer is going to make good of it.

In the short term, how are you assessing the risks and planning for the possible impact?
The impact of this situation will compel buyers to curtail their budgets on buying publicity material, calendars and diaries, etc. They might reduce the print runs of journals/house magazines but will have to print products like annual reports, etc which are mandatory.

In our case, before the government declared strict measures/ regulations, we asked our DTP and designing section to carry their PCs to home in taxi and work from home. Thus, the artworks of all our books, magazines etc would be ready to print. Now, here comes the real impact. All magazines have the posting dates between 1st and 6th of each month, 1 April to 6 April. Now, these clients will either publish the eMagazine; may drop the issue, or can think of combining the April/ May issue. This would be the real loss.

How is your company staying in touch with your partners/ customers?
Over the phone, or through email and WhatsApp.

One suggestion for the government?
Take at least 50% burden of interest for the period and put the recovery suits on fast-track.