Boettcher has been present in India since 2006, supplying rubber roller largely through imports. With Boettcher India plant located in Faridabad, NCR of Delhi, the company will be able to cut down on delivery times as well as costs.

Sandeep Saini, country manager at Boettcher Systems, said, “The start-up in 2014 was with a pilot plant for roller production. This venture gave impetus to the sales effort and at the same trained Boettcher India personnel for making roller surface in accordance with Boettcher’s global quality standards. As the next step in line with the market demand was to supply of rollers for nearly every type of sheetfed press in packaging segment. This demand was not only limited to the many different sheetfed presses, but to changing machine configurations in newspaper printing and for long runs in commercial web printing.”

The company announced the commencement of complete rubber roller production in India on 1 September 2016.

Boettcher will produce exchange roller for all the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) machines of offset industry and local customers along with re- rubberisation for any type of roller. “This will also help us to cater and meet the ever-changing demand and challenges of printing and packaging industry,” added Saini.

Speaking of capacity and capability of the new plant, Saini, said, “The Boettcher India plant is comparable with any of the Boettcher manufacturing plants across the globe. Now we can offer rubber rollers for any offset printing machine irrespective of model, size and application.”

Saini stressed that the quality of rollers manufactured at Faridabad location are on part with those manufactured at any of Boettcher’s 22 manufacturing units across the world.

“The reason is Boettcher has only one central rubber mixing plant in Gelsdorff, Germany which supplies rubber compound to all its manufacturing units .The rubber compound being the key deciding factor in quality and performance of a roller, you will get the same OEM quality for all the rollers made at Boettcher India, too,” said Saini.

Speaking about the pricing, Saini said that the company has revised the pricing such that “every offset printer in India can afford”.

“We have also devised a special corporate pricing in form of annual contracts. The same has been done with almost all major newspapers, and printing and packaging houses in India,” concluded Saini.

The Faridabad facility is equipped with a laboratory to customise its products on demand. The machines for manufacturing rollers have come from Boettcher's machinery park, while the compounding material and chemicals required for producing rubber rollers will all come from Germany.

Boettcher claims an 80% share in India’s new or one-way rollers market.

“With this new endeavour, we believe that Boettcher roller technology will have a wider customer reach and a much bigger market share. Indian customers will benefit from substantial cost as well as time savings with short delivery periods,” concluded Saini.