The machine is a six-colour printer plus coater with Heidelberg’s cold foil module Foilstar. The technology, introduced in 2010, offers brilliant metallic effects on labels, packaging and high-quality commercial print job, and it can be used for wide range of substrates. The cold foil is applied inline in an offset printing unit. Thus, the technology automatically benefits from the advantages of offset printing, such as short makeready times, register accuracy, fast job changes, and low printing form costs.

Shiv Bhatnagar, COO, Rave Scans, said, “The company’s packaging arm is a growing segment and this segment has good market potential. So, in the near future, the company will look forward to grow in this sector, at the same time keeping its old relation of commercial and the book binding in good shape.”

With an exclusive packaging unit at Gurgaon along with opening of new plant at Manesar, the company is now trying to meet the constantly growing demand for printed the paper board packaging. And with the machines such as Emmeci rigid-making (the first machine of this configuration in India equipped to produce 25,000 complete cartons daily), Bobst Nova Cut for die-cutting and a Bobst Vision Fold folder-gluer, the company now offers mono cartons, multicolour corrugated cartons, window patching cartons on paper and board with special effects and rigid boxes for perfumes, shoes, sweets, gifts, puzzle, pharma, cosmetics, personal care and mobile box industry.

The company invested around, Rs 85 crore in the installations. Rave has set up two factories adjacent to each other, one with a carpet area of 1,50,000 sq/ft and the other with 80,000 sq/ft and the existing Naraina plant with 30,000 sq/ft, which adds to 2,60,000 sq/ft.

Currently, 68% of the company’s business is commercial and the rest 32% is packaging. In commercial the share is 42%, 9%, 18% and 8% in publishing, corporate brochures and annual reports, pamphlets and comics respectively. In packaging, the company has 58% and 42% shares in rigid boxes and folding cartons respectively.

Illustrating an example about the difference in hot and cold foil, Noel Luan, product manager, Univacco, said, “It is not possible to print screen dot in hot foil, whereas the same is possible with cold foil. Further, the metal effect in register printing is limited in hot foil as compared to cold foil.”

While talking about environmental compatibility, engineers from Heidelberg said an annual output of four million sheets equals the reduction of 1,376,000 mt/sq backing film made of PET. This reduction results in avoiding 133 tonnes of carbon dioxide.