Pune-based Sai Paks organized an open house on 1 June at its plant in Chinchwad MIDC to showcase the newly installed Mark Andy P5 label press and commemorate 25 years of its existence. Sai Paks is a part of Sai Group which also consists of Sai Enterprises which prints cartons, brochures, danglers and visiting cards, among others.

Gourav Roy of FIG and Shaun Pullen of Mark Andy

Gourav Roy of FIG and Shaun Pullen of Mark Andy

Sai Paks installed the Mark Andy press  in January this year. Deepan Samarth founder of Sai Paks saw the press at last year’s Labelexpo Europe and signed the deal there. Sai Paks manufactures product labels, applicator labels, wet glue labels, holograms, shrink sleeves and barcode labels, among others. Apart from the new Mark Andy P5, the company also installed a new Rotoflex VSI offline inspection-cum-finishing unit. Also present at the event were Gourav Roy of Flexo Image Graphics (FIG) and Shaun Pullen of Mark Andy. FIG is the distributor for Mark Andy and Rotoflex in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Gulf and Africa.

“This is Pune’s first Mark Andy P5 label press and a very significant investment for us. We are now an established name in the Pune region and wanted to take the next technological leap to cater to the growing demand of customers here. We are witnessing strong demand for products like shrink sleeves,” says Samarth. Along with the new Mark Andy, the company has two Zonten stack flexo presses.

Mark Andy P5 is part of the Performance Series platform. The P5 installed at Sai Paks is 8-color press equipped with a cold foiling unit, chill rollers, servo driven motors and uses inks from Fuji Sericol.

“India is a rapidly growing market for self-adhesive labels. There is a shift happening from offset towards flexo when it comes to self-adhesive labels. There is a lot of enthusiasm in the India label industry. If you see the profile of the guests present at this open house you will see that there is only one existing Mark Andy customers. Rest all have come here to know about the label industry and Mark Andy. This shows there is a lot of excitement,” states Roy

“It is a very important development that a press like Mark Andy P5 has been installed at Pune. This is the first P5 press in Pune and it send out a message that FIG and Mark Andy are ready to go anywhere. India has been a bit of surprise for us. If you see the Southeast Asian region, it is dominated by letterpress. But here in India there is lot of flexo presses in the label industry mainly because of the popularity of small pack sizes,” says Pullen.

At present there are 35 installations of Performance series (P3, P5 and P7) presses in the Indian subcontinent with four installations of P5, two of which have been installed while two installations are underway.

“Joy of this press is that you can do variety of thing with this. It can handle very short runs to long runs with ease. It can do shrink sleeves and it can also do cartons. It is a very versatile press,” Pullen adds.

When asked the number of installations of P5 presses that can be expected this year, Roy says, “P5 is turning out to be the most popular model in the Performance series. While P7 is meant for specialized operations, P3 is the entry level press. As for the number of P5 presses we expect to install in 2018, it will surely be more than 10,” says Roy.

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