Five-colour pre-owned sounds perfect for book production: Narain Printers

Indra Narayan Mittal, owner, Narain Printers, says, “We went for two five-colour Heidelberg printing press to meet our day to day increasing demand of books. Including this machine, right now we have 22 printing units and all are of 28x40-inch in size. This machine has increased our book production capacity from 50,000 books to 75,000 books a day.”

Noida-based Narain Printers was started in 1993 by Prashant Mittal as a post-press unit in Delhi. The book printing company, run by IN Mittal and his son Prashant Mittal, has a complete setup for plate making and processing from Memory, and consumes around 100 CTP plates to feed its multicolour offset printing presses from Heidelberg and Polygraph; and web printing presses from Faridabad-based KK Printing Machines and NBG Printographic. Almost all of the presses at the unit are refurbished.

Asked why the company has been commission only four and five-colour refurbished presses, Mittal replied, “The reason we opted for a five colour press is because the turnover from printing multicolour books is much more than what we can attain from mono-colour. This is especially due to the high price war in the mono-colour book printing segment. As far as the question, why we opt for refurbished presses, the answer is cost. Refurbished presses are more cost-effective and also the technicians who work on pre-owned presses are more economical.”

These presses cater to almost all of the commercial print requirements of the market on paper and board, from bank instruments to calendars, diaries, books, corporate brochures, catalogues, danglers, labels, posters, folders, leaflets magazines and packaging material. “This range of services and products covers translation and DTP, designing, copy editing, typesetting, high quality scanning and image manipulation, offset printing, automated binding and finishing. A number of options are available from complex multiple personalised inserts to the largest campaign and launch mailings,” added Mittal.

“The long-term plan of our company is to establish a strong foot in book printing market, especially the educational books segment. For the same, we are currently focusing on creating a stronger post-press department, a reason why we recently acquired binding machines from Polygraph and a six-clamp book-binder from Welbound. Later, we also plan to expand our unit by adding more area to it,” he explains.

Narain Printers achieved Rs 9-crore turnover last year and is expecting an increment of Rs 2-crore this year. The printing company consumes five tons of paper a day in its round-the-clock operation run by a team of 100 people. Paper comes from all the major paper manufacturers and inks come from Coats with the consumption 600 kg per month. The company has enough storage of inks, paper and plates to run the facility smoothly. The company has specialization in book printing with a production of 50,000 books per day.