Bhaskar Book Manufacturers expands facility; plans packaging foray

Bouyed by the success of its notebook manufacturing business, following the installation of Heidelberg CD 102 in 2010 at its Hyderabad plant, Bengaluru-based multi-locational print company Bhaskar Book Manufacturers, has invested in a new facility and plans to foray into packaging.

19 Dec 2012 | By Rushikesh Aravkar

“We achieved tremendous success because of consistent quality of the Heidelberg press,” said CR Arjun Bhaskar, joint managing director, Bhaskar Book Manufacturers, the sister confirm of Bhaskar Stationers. Bhaskar Book Manufacturers, which was established in 2007, is one of the vendors for ITC’s classmate brand notebooks. It converts 650 tonnes of paper every month into Classmate notebooks. “The CD 102 has the capabilities of not only supporting our notebook manufacturing business but also our interest of venturing into packaging,” said Bhaskar about his company’s packaging plans.

Besides the new Heidelberg CD 102, Bhaskar Book also has a refurbished Mitsubishi press, which the company acquired to test its capabilities to print notebook covers. The company earlier outsourced its cover printing jobs to printers in its locality.

“We faced many print related issues such as improper reproduction of colours and inconsistent quality due to the dependence on other offset printers for the covers. However, we installed a refurbished Mitsubishi to test the process and acquaint ourselves with offset process in-house.”

He added, “Only after gaining confidence in our own offset process capabilities, using the refurbished Mitsubishi, did we opt for a brand new machine, which in my view offers far more superior quality than a refurbished one.”

Chakrapani Vemula, senior sales manager, Heidelberg India, said, “The company is quality conscious and carefully maintains the machine. The CD 102 has not experienced any breakdown since its installation in 2010. Currently they utilise only 70% of its capacity; the 30% extra capacity can be favourably used to execute their packaging plans.”

“The 40,000 sq/ft building built on the new site is ready and we will soon be shifting our entire notebook manufacturing facility there,” said Bhaskar, adding, “The next phase of investment will be in  pre-owned post-press equipment like die-cutting machine and folder-gluer so as to venture into packaging.”