Esko India will have its best year ever in terms of revenue in 2018 as demand for its solutions gains ground in the country, according to John Winderam, general manager, South-East Asia and South Asia, Esko.
“This year is going to be the best year ever for Esko in India from the revenue point of view. We have already surpassed last year’s figures with three months of this year still to go. Although last year was not that great, it was not a disaster as well,” he told Packaging South Asia during the recently concluded IndiaCorr Expo.
Arnab Maiti, sales director, South Asia, Esko said that corrugators in India are now getting very innovative and are increasingly demanding solutions from Esko. “We are offering solutions that make the prepress operations a lot easier,” he shared.
According to Winderam, a lot of customers are now saying that the prepress part of their business is increasingly becoming a bottleneck. “They are investing heavily in the downstream hardware, but to keep the presses running optimally, they need to constantly feed them jobs. Now that job volumes are getting bigger and more complex, customers are facing problems in the upstream part, which is the prepress. So, we are focusing on software solutions that will make prepress easier, less error prone and more automated,” Winderam said.
One such software solution, according to Maiti, is the WebCenter QuickStart for Corrugated, which was launched at IndiaCorr Expo. WebCenter QuickStart for Corrugated is a design workflow management solution for corrugated converters. Based on Esko’s WebCenter, WebCenter QuickStart for Corrugated comes preloaded with proven workflows that will increase a customer’s capacity to handle a greater number of design requests. With this software, the approval process is now integrated. WebCenter shows when a document or an asset was sent for an approval, who the approver is and when it is approved. The software automatically triggers the next tasks after that approval. It all happens in real-time.
“With WebCenter QuickStart for Corrugated, you have a workflow that helps convertors and their clients to work in a collaborative manner so that the whole process becomes seamless,” said Maiti.
In addition to the WebCenter QuickStart for Corrugated, Esko also talked about its other software solutions like ArtiosCAD and demonstrated the Kongberg X24 table during the expo.
Excellence center is a success
Esko India inaugurated its first packaging excellence center in Mumbai, India on 14 March 2018. Since then the response to it has been extremely encouraging, shared Winderam. “We’ve had a lot of potential customers come and have demo sessions at the excellence center. We have organized user group meetings at the center. So, the response from the industry has been extremely encouraging,” he added.
The packaging excellence center, located in Danaher’s premises in Mumbai, is equipped with a Kongsberg table, which is fully compatible for packaging, corrugated and signage applications, a CDI Spark 2530 plate maker and a range of Esko software.
Flexo gaining momentum
Flexo technology has gained a lot of ground in India in the last few years with a number of new presses getting installed, and Maiti believes this trend will continue in the future.
“With flexo printing technology gaining momentum, Esko is putting a lot of focus on this area. If people buy more flexo presses, the volume of plates will go up and so will the demand for Esko solutions,” he said.
