Image Gravures ups capacity with fourth engraver

Vijay Jobanputra, chief executive officer – business operation at Image Gravures, told the PrintWeek India team visiting its Gandhinagar plant that, the company has added two Hell K5 engravers to the existing two Hell K5 kit in last few months. “The installation of the fourth engraver was completed last week. Now we can produce 85 gravure cylinders per day,” he said.

During PrintWeek India’s visit to Image’s plant in Gandhinagar, the team also saw two new copper tanks and a chrome plating machine being installed. With this expansion, Jobanpurta claims to have notched third position among cylinder makers in Ahmedabad, in terms of capacity. “Image Gravures is one of the few cylinder manufacturers, who have in-house base-shell manufacturing set-up. This helps the company remain ahead of the competition with faster speed-to-market,” he said.

Besides gravure cylinder manufacturing, the company has invested in pre-press set-up in order to cater to printers as well as print buyers with pre-media services.

Jobanputra said, “We are introducing a unique concept of gray balance calibration process. Where in, we monitor our engraving machines output with reference to international standards of rotogravure printing in terms of gray values. Also, we perform finger printing trials on each printing machine at printer’s end. And based on the same we modify the artwork files and engrave the cylinders accordingly.”

This practise, according to Jobanputra, helps to achieve print standardisation across the print cycle. “This is the need of the day as every brand owner wants exact reproduction of its brand colour on all the packaging materials,” addedJobanputra.

According to Jobanputra, the company plans to set up new marketing offices in Mumbai and Delhi in order to cater to the brand owners.

Established in 2010 by two young entrepreneurs Anant Patel and Parag Patel, Image Gravures has seen a year-on-year growth of over 20% and is expected to clock a turnover of over Rs 7-crore.