Milo Narayan Mishra of Icons Printers Kenya is a big name in the African print industry. He is known as the driving force that established India’s largest manufacturer of web offset machines, Manugraph, in the African market. Later, he ventured into providing printing services, based out of Nairobi and is leading his group through two daughter companies - Icons Printers and Prints Arts.

Milo Mishra has overseen the procurement of machines from Bindwel. Today, the group boasts seven offline machines including four Freedom 4K 12 clamp offline binders, Trimit trimmers and a full-fledged inline solution — Bindline 5K. The print technologist is familiar with binding technology and donned the hat of an engineer and sales head before venturing into print production. Also, he says that he is much more comfortable with Indian equipment as compared to what he can get from Europe.

Collectively, they are one of the largest book printing companies in East Africa. Multiple web offset machines of varying cut-offs — from Manugraph and SigMarq — form the pillars of his printing business. Covers are printed using four-colour sheetfed presses from Komori. They have a Horizon offline 12-station gatherer, and a battery of sewing machines from Muller Martini and Meccanotecnica, the makers of Aster.

According to a Bindwel spokesperson, "Most of the books manufactured by Icon printers are thread sewn, and they use the Bindwel BBF5K book block feeder to feed them into the Freedom 5K perfect binder." Icon uses a long conveyor to be fed into a Trimit 30C three-knife trimmer. The complete line was installed and operational support was given by the Bindwel team led by Rijo Pappachan, a senior engineer with Bindwel, towards the end of last year. The first level of support was provided by the Bindwel team based in Dubai and Nairobi.

Mayur Bharate, who heads exports for Bindwel, said, "For perfect binding, Bindwel has been a consistent partner with the Icons group. They were happy with our machines and service and also helped us by being willing to wait for longer delivery schedules." Bharate said, "Their commitments to technology and partners are something to learn from and we have done our best to support them." 

The books printed by the Icons-Prints Arts group are for the educational segment, and this covers both the Government and private sectors in East Africa. Kenya is one of the rare countries in Africa that has achieved self-sufficiency in printing books for domestic consumption. And that is thanks to the efforts of business leaders like Milo Mishra.

In addition to printing books, the group also manufactures the corrugated boxes needed for shipping them and has a dedicated plant for brown boxes.