Seventy five minutes with Balachandra at Rajhans Enterprises

Winners execute all tasks differently as happens in case of Rajhans Enterprises who are currently printing over fifty prominent magazines and around seven newspapers apart from doing commercial as well as packaging jobs. After spending a few minutes over a cup of coffee with A Balachandra at their well equipped facility in Bengaluru, perhaps counted among the top ten preferred entrepreneurial locations in the country, SK Khurana, editor – Print & Publishing briefs where one of India’s leading printers stands today.

Having printing as their natural instinct, two brothers – Ravindranath and A Balachandra started a printing press of their own in the year 1983, which is presently an ISO 9001 certified company under the name and style of ‘Rajhans Enterprises’. With approach to become total printing solutions for their valued clients, the founders continued focusing steadily and channelising all their will towards nurturing the company and delivering the best to the clients which has made one of the largest and best printing firms in the South India.

“Having no manager, no supervisor and no foreman on our shop floor, we have designated each of our staff to be self responsible with greater extent which enable us to offer the best price, quality and service,” conveys Balachandra who leads the marketing, production and innovation segments for the company, putting in his 12-13 hours every day, while his brother Ravindranath spearheads the projects, administration and finance departments. The new heirs Ashwath and Akash have also joined them, infusing much energy and bold conviction making them a dedicated foursome with a singular vision of taking Rajhans Enterprises towards higher horizons.

The perfect harvest reaping with state-of-the-art infrastructure and its co-ordination with the manpower at each stage of production is vital in bringing to life the vision of the founders. Rajhans Enterprises is fully equipped to cater to both the high quality needs of commercial printing and the high speed with bulk orders of the publication industry. Planning right in pre-press, the first step towards reaping plentiful harvest is sowing the right seeds. Rajhans Enterprises makes use of globally preferred MACs PCs along with the latest software like Indesign, Quark Express, Creo-preps, PageNation, etc alongwith an array of sheetfed offset machines (presently 12 machines with 46 printing units) from leading brands like Heidelberg, Mitsubishi, Roland and Komori; seven commercial/heatset web presses of brands like Komori, Solna, Mitsubishi, etc; and seven coldset web presses (range 508, 546, 560 cutoff) Super Orient, FAST and Newsline and pre-press units equipped with three CtPs, three imagesetters; and a host of post press equipments which include folding, perfect binding, saddle stitchers, die cutting, hot-foiling, section sewing, index cutting, etc are taking care that the final presentation of the product remains top-class.

The company has the distinction of being the preferred printing house for many esteemed newspapers and magazines in the country. Whether it is a colorful magazine, a daily newspaper, a glossy Sunday supplement, textbooks, coffee table books or comic books they print them all sophisticatedly. “Presently, apart from printing newspapers like The Times of India, Eenadu-Telugu Daily, Rajasthan Patrika-Hindi Daily, Malayala Manorama, Deccan Herald, Dinakaran – Tamil Daily, Udayavani- Kannada Daily, we are contract printers for as much as 55 magazines, including: Femina English & Hindi, Hello, Grazia, BBC-Topgear, BBC-Good Homes, Femina Srilanka, Femina Girl, What to Wear, Sudha, CineBlitz, CineBlitz-Inflight, Hi Living-National, Hi Living-Inflight, Priyanka, Mayura, Chitra, Elle, Elle Décor, Brides Now, Beautiful People, My World, Outlook, Update, Business World, Open, Yuva, Confetti, Sunday Indian (Southern Languages), etc,” mentioned Balachandra. “And we do print and publish our own three magazines which are in local language and not competing with any of the magazines being printed by us.”

“Undertaking such a volume of jobs, we consume around 70 ton papers per day and plate consumption goes around 1,100 plates a day (TechNova and Kodak brand), while we use inks manufactured by Huber/Micro Inks. Another major secret behind our success is to follow strict financial discipline. We prefer to receive and pay our dues in stipulated well defined time-frames which make our considerable time more productive rather going waste otherwise,” conveyed Balachandra popularly known as Bali.

While most of the printers run after getting jobs from multinational companies, Rajhans prefer to work for domestic clients in a great number. “There is cut throat competition in dealing with multinational companies, creating pressure to compromise on prices beyond a limit,” argued Balachandra. Talking about the possibility of Rajhans going digital way, Balachandra instant reaction was, “We in India are pretty sure that offset process shall remain the key technology where long run jobs shall always remain in demand. These long run jobs only can get us the revenues at the desired level. We did acquire one digital press two years ago, but that has not fitted into our work-culture so far.