S Chand set to roll-out 2.5 cr books a year

The new plant will serve as an integrated book printing and binding plant essentially focusing on their in-house titles.

The plant will have a combination of eleven multi-colour KBA sheetfed  with a size of 28x40-inch and two 4-Hi towers of Goss web offset printing presses with a cut-off size of 578 mm.

S Chand have also installed two Fujifilm CTP solutions and according to a company estimation the CTPs will use around two lakh violet plates per year.

Himanshu Gupta, joint managing director, S Chand, said, “The two plants together Rudrapur and New Delhi have capacities to produce books required today by the company. Our plant at New Delhi is congested and inadequate to house the current full production capacity of the KBA fleet of machines that we have.

The Rudrapur plant has our web machines with an integrated online binding unit, we have put emphasis on upgradation of manpower skills for most of our sophisticated machineries.”

The post-press department at the new plant consists of machines from Muller Martini, Welbound and Wohlenberg. S Chand expects to produce 5,000 books per hour, and the machines will roughly operate for 20 hours per day.

“We can produce over 2.5 crore books per year by combining the capacity of all our three plants. We intend to double our capacity of current production,” concluded Gupta.

The plant has a total production area of one lakh sqft with a manpower of 325 people. The plant will have the capacity to produce around 1.75 lakh books per day.