Micro Inks: a maven to
reckon within newspaper ink market
Performance speaks! In case of India’s largest printing ink manufacturer Micro Inks, a hubergroup company enjoying around fifty percent share in domestic newspaper ink market while producing good amount of ink (valuing Rs 1,350 crore) in a unique indigenously designed plant, it is apparently obvious. Since its inception, the company is functioning sophisticatedly, with relentless endeavours, and their success palpably depicts in the constantly rising curve of accomplishments. All About Newspapers editors
S K Khurana and S M Dutt, who recently visited their plant and overviewed manufacturing processes, brief.
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ppraising the print, publishing and allied industry activities in India’s industrially prosperous western coastal state Gujarat, the mission will remain incomplete without taking proper consideration of Vapi. Situated on the banks of Damanganga in Valsad district of the state, having population of around seventy thousand, the city is famed globally as the Asia’s largest industrial area in terms of small-scale industries dominated by chemical industry plants among which the ‘small world of Micro Inks’, as they mention it moderately, prevails.
The credit for achieving global recognition to this small city, may say India’s ink capital, undoubtedly goes to Bilakhia brothers who established Micro Inks (initially known as Hindustan Inks) as a small scale industrial unit in 1987 and brought it as one of the world’s leading ink manufacturers within two decades. By 1999, the company emerged as numero uno player in the domestic market, and by 2004, with a presence in over 52 countries, they stimulatingly accomplished the new prestige being among the top fifteen ink manufacturing companies across the world. The year 2006 marked the greatest turning point, when hubergroup entered into a joint venture with them, and afterwards Micro Inks is remarkably surging apace being committed to stand at the helm in serving huge global ink market. Obviously, we were adequately inspired to reach Vapi for the on-site visit of such a rapidly burgeoning company.
Being there, we witnessed the reality: to what extent Micro Inks has grown up. S S Kulkarni, general manager, Micro Inks was genial enough to brief us about their manufacturing process as well as plant apparatus, apart from arranging a guided tour to their works, spanning a whole day, which was indeed hard to cut-short, so as to cover all manufacturing processes operated in-house involving a total backward integration. Be it production of pigments or resins, the plant is definitely integrated one, sophisticatedly established within a single location.
Later, proudly narrating the prolific journey of Micro Inks and hubergroup together wherein the transition period has been very successful, the company’s managing director Ashwini Bhardwaj (known for his modesty) asserted that Huber’s ‘know-how’ of technology and management techniques are now the ‘know-how’ of Micro Inks in Vapi, whose ‘least cost model’ has been making waves world over. The secret behind their palpable success has been ‘large volume produced by simplified, uninterrupted manufacturing process’, making production really cost effective all the time.
Prior to their amalgamation with hubergroup, Micro Inks would supply pigments and resins to other ink manufacturers in India and overseas as well. But not any more now, as the demand of finished inks by hubergroup is sufficiently high, which prohibits Micro Inks to sell these to third party manufacturers. Inks worth Rs 600 crore annually is exported from Vapi plant to their group companies overseas, out of which ninety percent relates to finished ink. Exports to UAE and other few countries made directly from Indian plant of Micro Inks amounts to around Rs 150 crore every year. Overall, more than fifty percent of their production goes for overseas market. On querying about the different quality level of inks marketed in India or European countries, the reply was that it remains exactly the same.
The production capacities of various inks in different plants at Morkhal, Daman and Vapi are in excess of 1,00,000 MT per annum. The core strength in producing this huge quantum of ink has been the ‘efficiency’ in their manufacturing processes, involving the team work of a group of motivated staff of 600 plus individuals. “One of the added features of manufacturing activities is ‘flexibility’ within processes which provides us a total freedom to enhance the productivity,” averred Bhardwaj. “We have also adopted ‘flushed pigment technology’ for better colour brightness and high quality colour-reproduction,” he conveyed further.
“Another significant input in ink manufacturing is ‘power supply’ which again cost us around Rs 60–70 crore every year. The cost per unit of electricity supplied by state government is quite high and as such we always rely on our own power generation. This factor too has been instrumental in providing further cost-competitiveness to us,” stated Bhardwaj. Micro Inks has also been pioneer in introducing the concept of ATM (any time matching) which helps printers with smaller/specific shade or quantity instantly, apart from providing 24x7 technical supports.
Talking about domestic market, he enunciated proudly, “Today, there is hardly any newspaper in India who does not buy ink from us. We enjoy fifty percent share in domestic newspaper ink market. Apart from offset inks (heatset, coldest, and sheetfed), we also have strong presence in flexible packaging inks, screen inks, can coatings, UV coating & inks, press chemicals and wire enamel.”
“Deep insights and rigid internal discipline based quality culture of hubergroup is now the driving force behind our quality products. In recent past, we together developed !NKREDIBLE technology for the offset inks, which has been proved to be distinctly superior and we are constantly endeavouring to come-up with further innovations for providing better value to our customers from our ‘small world’,” concluded Bhardwaj.
