Autoprint celebrates its 10,000th installation

The highpoint of the event was Usman Khan of Jivandeep in Lekhimpur-Kehri (125 kms from Lucknow) being the proud recipient of the Dion 450. This makes Khan the first person in this backward district of Uttar Pradesh to have installed a four colour printing press.

The 22 year old Autoprint has overcome a tough marketplace in the past three years and continued on the development path at its Coimbatore factory.

A feather in its cap has been the introduction of the Checkmate 50. One quality inspection machines has been operating on a beta site in Bengaluru for two years. During this period, the tech team at Autoprint has been tweaking the efficiency of the machine in the folding carton segment which have been boosted with three Chromasen lenses.

The Checkmate will be installed in Mumbai, soon. A few installations are on the cards.

But Autoprint's success has been with the mini offset presses and small format devices - all across India.

Autoprint's managing director C N Ashok said the company was experiencing increased demand across its technology offering, "especially in smaller cities where it has it markets ... This includes the small and mid-sized businesses". He hoped, in his short speech that the company will have an Autoprint installed each and every "pin code centre" of India.

Crunching the data, out of 10000 installs for Autoprint, a majority of the installs have been in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities of India. It's strength has always been the penetration of its machine in these segments. For example, the winner of the Alto Maruti car under the Lakshmi Kataksh scheme was Husen Bhai from Shama Offset in Junagadh in Gujarat.

According to Ashok, the semi-urban and rural parts of India are the growing segments. "At Autoprint, the marketing at rural and semi-urban places have been rewarding and this is one such example," he added.

"We're seeing consistent trends that indicate the benefit of our broad product line and expanded services as well as modest economic improvements," he said.

It was to celebrate this success that the Autoprint event called Utsav 10000 was attended by the who's who of the industry. This included K S Khurana, the president of the Indian Printing and Allied Machinery Manufacturer's Association (IPAMA) as well as Dev Nair and Anand Limaye of the All India Federation of Master Printers (AIFMP) and C D Kumarvel who is the president of the Coimbatore Master Printers Association. In addition there were many of Autoprint's dealers and partners across India plus past presidents of the AIFMP.

The above dignitaries were part of a factory visit during the early part of the day.

In addition to the manufacturing site and demo centre, one of the highlights of the Autoprint factory is its 15 year old training setup. The firm provides three types of training. One is when a new service engineer joins and he is given induction training; then there is a refresher training which is given to upgrade the knowledge of the person in the field, and the third one is the customer training before installation.

The investment for training, with machines, infrastructure and manpower put together, would be approximately Rs 40 lakh.

This includes, tutorials of what the machine does; a video tutorial for understanding of settings and paper handling. In addition there is a focus on paper feeding on the machine. On third and fourth days, there is a focus on ink settings etc. By the end of the fourth day there is a review and a test, to check whether the delegates require extensive training or not.

Almost all of the dignitaries spoke about Autoprint and its range of presses which includes: the 1510 Colt (single-colour), 1520 Colt (single-colour) and Knight (single-colour). There's also the Dion 250, Dion 450+ etc. In post-press it has Repetto, Reckoner VDP etc.

Dev Nair in his address as president of AIFMP extolled the Autoprint team to "manufacture a SpeedMaster next."

Autoprint was established on 6 December, 1992. Today the manufacturer of offset print and allied machines have three manufacturing factories, two in Coimbatore and one in Himachal Pradesh. Apart from these, there is a customer care centre and head office.