GUK’s Friedrich Faulhaber: We make in Germany, for India

With the changing regulatory landscape in the pharma sector across the world, how is the role of patient information leaflet is changing?

The role of patient information leaflet is becoming more and more important. This is true especially in the Asian markets like China and India, where in the former years, patient information was not necessarily supplied with the pharmaceutical product, the regulatory bodies have now started mandating that relevant and complete information is supplied with the pharma product.

Moreover, with the increasing amount of regulatory information that should be supplied along with the product, the sheet size of leaflets is growing bigger. However, the pharma companies do not want to change the size of cartons to accommodate the bigger leaflets. Hence, the converters’ challenge is to fold these bigger leaflets to the minimum folded size. The biggest leaflet sheet size today is 1040x520-mm.

GUK has introduced a made-for-India Multimaster 38 leaflet folding machine at PrintPack. Tell us more.

The Multimaster was originally designed as a commercial folder by MB Bäuerle, the company which was acquired by GUK in 2017. This is a mechanically set up machine so there’s minimal electronics in there. This machine was reviewed to find if there is a possibility to put away comforts that are not needed in a market like India. That is when we redesigned the machine for leaflet folding application and to match GUK quality for smaller leaflets. We have worked on several features to make this machine affordable for the Indian market.

What are these features?

In the infeed section you have the facility to accurately align the papers, which is step one for the precise quality fold, there are high-quality pockets that enable quick change, the fold roller section is equipped with belt drives instead of gears. There are pre-setting controls that make it an extremely easy-to-use machine.

Which is your target market for this machine?

Our customers in the Indian market, which start with a simple machine, when they improve their skills, and when they are work better on the paper processing then they also demand a GUK machine. There is a big gap between the pricing in the Indian machines and GUK machines. India is an important market for us and we have a really good relationship with our customers wanted to offer any possibility that we can enlarge our base in India also with the smaller companies which are not exporting goods. And so, the idea is to make the machines at the best available price for Indian market. We do not make in India, we make in Germany, for India. The idea is to help customers achieve the productivity with the machines and the productivity gives them the opportunity to make money, to be successful. And this is our first goal that our customers in India can be successful with a reliable high performance machine.

GUK has always been targeting the top-of-the-pyramid companies. Will that change with Multimaster?

Our plan is to help smaller companies to develop their capabilities and mature to the next level. We are not just talking about pharmaceutical market. There are many other segments which need information sheets to go with the product. We will leverge the extensive sales and service network of Impel-Welbound to sell and install the machines in the Indian market.