The company has two plants, one in Nacharam and another in Gandhi Nagar in Hyderabad totalling 40,000-sqft. The Gandhi Nagar plant also houses its corporate office as well as a facility for packaging. The plants are equipped with two six-colour + coater, four four-colour and one two-colour offset presses, a Nilpeter FB 350 press; a Screen CTP platesetter and a raft of India-made die-punching and creasing, and a local folder-gluer. It also has post-press machines for book-bind works.

Sudhakar Sunkara, director at SP Hi-Tech Printers, said, “We are strengthening our factory at Gandhi Nagar, and in this process, we were evaluating several alternatives for the folder-gluer. We concluded that the Bobst Ambition 106 A2 folder-gluer offered the best overall solution to fulfil our wider business strategy considering our future plans.”

The 22-year-old company SP Hi-Tech produces close to 1.5-lakh packaging items including mono and MetPET cartons and printing up to six-colour. The Bobst Ambition 106 A2 folder-gluer installed at the company is capable to do straight line open blank width of 76 to 1,100 mm, lock bottom open blank width of 146 to 1,100mm and a speed of up to 300 m/min. The variable speed independent drive enables easy adjustments on the machines in real-time during running and enables handing of typical boxes.

Sunkara said that the Bobst folder-gluer machine is an addition to his company’s existing local folder gluer. “Before installing Bobst Ambition 106 A2 we had constraint with the abilities of the existing folder-gluer, which does not allow us to produce quality and volume of cartons with different shapes and sizes. For example, with the Bobst kit we will be able to produce various shapes of straight-line cartons, lock-bottom, disproportionate cartons, double wall boxes, three-ply corrugated boxes of both A and B type, taper crease boxes, which otherwise we could not do with our existing machines,” said Sunkara.

Sunkara (r) with Purna Chandra Rao

Sunkara added, “That’s not all. The commercial business at present is not in the good shape, however, the packaging segment has been consistently growing during this pandemic and the trend will continue in coming years. While we have the capacity to print the required quantity, we also wanted to augment our facility to finish the cartons quickly, rather than creating a bottleneck in the process.”

 He added, “Our research suggests Bobst folder gluer is the best in quality, reliability and productivity on which you can bank upon for commitment to your end customers. This new machinery has given us the leverage to do folding and glueing a wide range of cartons with quality and efficiently than before.”

Sunkara is assisted by his brother, Purna Chandra Rao, in managing the print business. The company employs 140 people.

According to Sunkara, the packaging market is growing and the demand for good packaged products is growing day by day. “The new Bobst kit gives us the confidence that we will meet the challenges of the future, and be able to offer more innovative solutions to our customers.”