Vakils inks a Global Alliance for pre-media services

As per the official announcement, King Printing Company, a manufacturer of top quality short-run books, announced that it has continued the expansion of its Global Book Production Alliance with the addition of Mumbai-based Vakils Premedia. King Printing has been working closely with Milan-based Rotolito Lombarda for book production services in Europe and Africa. The addition of Vakils not only expands King’s and Rotolito’s affordable distribution footprint but also adds expert pre-media resources to supplement those located in their Boston and Milan headquarters.

“We are delighted to be part of the King Printing - Rotolito Global Alliance,” said Bimal Mehta, the managing director of Vakils Premedia. “The Alliance will make it easier and more affordable for foreign publishers to print and distribute within India, as well as for Indian publishers to take advantage of US and European resources without any concerns about quality or reliability.”

“As a family-owned business, we are very particular about our partnerships,” said Adi Chinai, the managing director of King Printing Company, in operation since 1978. “We personally know and trust the families that own and operate Rotolito and Vakils. All three companies have second and third generation management. We have similar business ethics and quality standards, and we have full confidence in their ability to deliver to the exacting demands of our publishers and authors. We are especially excited about Vakils’ eBook expertise that will allow us to reduce our cycle time and keep costs in line for these labor-intensive file conversions to a wide variety of eBook file formats.”

“We are living in a global economy, and we’re facing new challenges and opportunities every day,” said Emanuele Bandecchi, the marketing manager at Rotolito Lombarda. “For this reason, we consider this alliance as necessary to our ability to be competitive in a difficult market.” Rotolito, founded in 1976 by Emanuele’s father, Paolo Bandecchi, is today one of the largest private printing companies in Europe, with a long-time experience in the production of books, catalogues, magazines and flyers. “Our existing and potential customers, who are working all over the world, will surely take
advantage of this relationship, thanks to the high standards King and Vakils can provide respectively in printing and prepress,” he added. 

Publishers will not only save time with the services now offered by the Global Alliance, but will also save significant shipping dollars. “With the addition of Vakils to our network,” Chinai added, “we already have interest from publishers who were previously printing books in the US and shipping
them to India in order to maintain control over the process.  However, the samples we have shown them from Vakils are impressive, and they are amazed at how this will revolutionise their global business.”

Speaking exclusively to PrintWeek India, Mehta said, I am a strong believer of partnerships. Small companies, like ourselves cannot survive unless we partner and join hands with like-minded firms.  There is too much over-capacity and therefore alliances and sharing of resources is a good idea. For us this relationship, we are leveraging our capabilities in pre-media and ePublishing business as well as strengthening the distribute and print model - which I think has good potential.

Vakils Premedia provides integrated premedia services which include packaging, prepress, e-Publishing and cross media services.  The company is equipped with best-in-class infrastructure and IT security systems as per ISO 27001:2005 standards. Vakils Premedia is a subsidiary of Vakil & Sons Pvt. Ltd. (Vakils).  Vakils has been a pioneer in the printing and publishing business for more than 66 years. 

Today, Vakils offers book composition and typesetting; and eBook production, OCR Capture and file conversion, scanning and digitisation, XML and PDF conversion, along with web development. Besides this, Vakils who have invested in an Esko package can offer art work production, 3D mock-ups, layout adoptions.

In 2011, Vakils’ pre-media operations and US-based Jyoshan Digital Media Services, promoted by Venkat ‘Puru’ Purushotham formed a company called JVX Media Services to deliver content on cross-media platforms. It began with providing annual reports in XBRL format and will subsequently lead to more cross-media technology. The plan according to Mehta is to leverage “the Vakils brand among the publishers and corporations and clients in Australia, Europe, UK and the US.”