Explaining the decision to acquire third-party printing jobs, Lalit Misri, general manager – works, Super Cassette Industries, said, “Earlier, our printing units were dedicated for in-house work. Ever since, the business of audio cassettes has taken a huge dip follwed by CDs, we decided to utilise our printing facility for undertaking other jobs.”

Of the total production churned out by the only printing unit of the company, still 40% encompasses in-house jobs. The remaining 60% consists of packaging printing jobs for perfume brands, pharmaceutical companies, magazine publishers and other commercial printing jobs.

The company has been undergoing the process of expansion, which includes investment in machinery such as a new four-colour Heidelberg CD 102 offset press, to meet its growing fleet of customers. The printing unit houses a Roland 500 and Dominant four-colour 19x26-inch presses, six-clamp perfect binding machine, one Diploma machine capable of folding 16 and 32 pages respectively and a three-knife trimmer from Welbound.

The unit also has Yoko die-cutter from Galaxy Propac, Eterna folder gluer machine from Suba Solutions, offline and spot UV machines from APL Machinery, two pasting machines and a series of manual die-cutting machines which are also used for embossing and de-bossing purposes. Misri is optimistic that once the expansion work is complete, the production capacity as well as the returns from the unit would be three times.


The Eterna folder gluer machine from Suba Solutions

Super Cassette has 10 designers equipped with eight Mac systems to design the jobs. In the plate making department, a Kodak Trendsetter 800 which consumes around 125 plates every day is awaiting to be replaced with a CTP that can process plates at a higher speed. 

The commercial and packaging printing company, which is gearing up for attaining various certifications, also has print management systems to manage the workflow, Chinese sample maker, Epson wide-format printer for proofing, digital printing machine from Xerox for short run jobs.

With a turnover of Rs 18-crore, Super Cassette’s printing facility employs over 100 people. The company, which prefers new machines over refurbished ones, has invested over Rs 8-crore in the printing facility. Misri confirmed that Super Cassette plans to invest more in procuring machines in the coming year.

The investment would be done largely focusing around 20% growth in the packaging segment.
“The growth in packaging has provided an impetus to the packaging printing market. With the plastic packaging for Gutkha being shifted to paper packaging the scope of growth has further widened. We estimate a 20% growth for the paper and board packaging,” concluded Misri.
 

 
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