On the anvil: manufacturing facility with a vision

APL Machinery Pvt Ltd is all set to establish a world-class manufacturing unit in Prithla near Faridabad in northern part of India. The company is well known for their offline UV coaters and other printing machines, not only in India but in overseas countries as well. Here, CP Paul, director, APL shares his future plans with Print & Publishing. Faridabad, an important and oldest part of NCR, has been the manufacturing hub for industries since 1960. Today, in printing segment alone, there are as many as 10-12 large printing houses and around 50 manufacturing units related to printing and printing machinery, employing as many as 50,000 people. One such well-known manufacturer in this region is APL Machinery Pvt Ltd (earlier known as Abhishek Print Line).

APL Machinery is spearheaded by CP Paul, a modest, young and energetic person, also a visionary in his field. As per CP Paul, chairman, APL Machinery Pvt Ltd, they will soon be shifting to their dream factory, a two-acre facility in Prithla (10 km from their existing operating unit in sector 59, Faridabad), which will be one of its kind. “The factory is being built in an area of 65,000 sq ft area with latest machineries for the production of machines involving an investment of around Rs 20 crore,” he informed. As a matter of fact, APL Machinery Pvt Ltd is one of the leading manufacturers, suppliers and exporters of printing and allied machines including dry offset printing machines, screen printing machines for round and flat objects, fully auto UV, coating and curing machines (full & spot), UV curing systems (for offset, spot and full varnish, PVC profiles, wood, metal etc), screen exposing unit and self stretching aluminium frames.

With the new facility, Paul is hoping to cross a turnover over Rs 30 crore in 2013 but their long-term desire is to become a Rs 100 cr company. And for this, Paul will leave no stone unturned – new products would be launched, old ones would be upgraded and as always, quality and timely delivery would be their prime motto. “Besides, we are open for joint ventures or acquisitions of overseas companies to become further techno-savvy. For this, we have already appointed a consultancy firm for facilitating such opportunities,” he added. Two times participation in DRUPA (Dusseldorf) has also brought them a lot of visibility over global market.

“We have recently launched a double-station offline UV coater with a speed of 5000 cph at Printpack India 2011 in New Delhi, which was much appreciated. We are even planning to showcase it at IGAS, Japan, as we feel that there is big potential in the Japanese market since lot of transformation taking place in that country. Besides, we are trying to increase the speed of this machine to 10,000 cph so that printers can get better value for money,” told Paul.

This success has not been instant for Paul and APL Machinery. Behind this big picture is a story of lot of hard work and dedication. “Way back in 1960, my father was working at Hindustan Syringes, taking care of their printing requirements. Once Ramesh Burman from Dabur visited our factory and was impressed with the quality of printing. This finally landed my father to develop newer screen printing machines to facilitate printing of the containers for Chyavanprash. In just two and half month’s time, my father developed the first Indian screen printing machine and installed it at his house and started printing those containers. Then there was no looking back. In fact, there was a time when we were printing 10 lakh containers per day for Dabur. At that time, we had eight printing facilities near Dabur’s manufacturing units at different locations in the country with a fleet of 300 workforces,” recalled Paul fondly.

When Paul himself joined the business in 1993, he started a new company called Abhishek Print Line. “We installed an in-house automatic machine from Kammann, which costed us a whopping rupees one crore at that time.” Soon, Paul thought that he cannot further grow with printing business, so they started manufacturing screen printing machines in 1995. In 1999, Abhishek Print Line manufactured their first UV machine. Though the machine was very crude but worked well. “Soon, we received orders for three UV machines and our turnover crossed rupees four lakh in the first year itself and there came a time to make a change in our company’s name to APL Machinery Pvt Ltd. with even increasing work load, my wife, Swati Paul decided to join the company and has now got full grip on the operational issues” told Paul. And now to take APL to next level, fresh entry of Rajiv Kapoor as a new CEO is significant. Rajiv brings with him a wealth of experience at Stovec, A.T.E. and Technova. “But APL is the most challenging job for me,” added Rajiv.

“In fact, I feel that the future for UV is bright for the next 10-15 years,” told Paul enthusiastically. They attribute 60 percent of their turnover to come from UV Machines including Double station, Fully Automatic and Semi-automatic Machines, Screen Printing Machine & UV Coating & Curing Machine. “Presently, our exports account 20 percent of our business but when our new facility becomes operational, we will increase it significantly. We already have dealers in Australia, France, Germany, Italy and USA. We also have a tie-up with Albatross from US, for whom we are the world’s number one distributors for UV lamps in India and south Asia,” concluded Paul.

In our diversification plans, we are pursuing environmental friendly technologies. Non–Woven Bag Making & Printing Machine is the first launch in this direction. We will be concentrating on development of these machines and keep on upgrading the same.