The immense growth of the corrugation industry in India in recent years has warranted the absorption of imported machines in India with a stable sales network that provides accessible and professional service. Earlier, only large companies undertook regular expansion activities, but recently a trend of medium scale corrugators upgrading to automatic or semi-automatic machines has been observed. But has supply already exceeded the demand for quality corrugation in India?
Suba Solutions is a company with a reputation for offering high quality imported corrugation machinery at affordable prices. It has solutions for postpress cartons, duplex cartons, 5-ply plants for corrugation, flexo printer slotters, flute laminators along with automatic and semi-automatic diecutting machines amongst other ancillary equipment options. With material handling systems and bailing presses also in its portfolio, Suba Solutions is well equipped to fulfill all requirements pertaining to the corrugation industry. In the commercial printing space, the company sells converting equipment such as autoplated diecutters and folder-gluers for cartons.
C Naresh, director of Suba Solutions, speaking to Packaging South Asia at the Corrtech Expo held simultaneously with the 43rd FCBM Conference says that although as a company Suba Solutions has achieved volume growth in the last and currentfinancial years,the overall market situation has not been very encouraging. “Fully automatic plants have come up in the country at a brisk pace while the smaller and more fragmented industry has not been able to keep up with. Sadly, because of some stagnation developing, many of the upcoming projects are either getting shelved or postponed.”Corrugation materials are bulky and heavy in nature and are a factor which also need to be considered by the corrugator when looking at the space requirements for new plants or machinery.
Demand does not seem to have kept up with the machinery coming in or which has already been installed and commissioned. Another challenge for the industry is the lack of skilled manpower, says Naresh. Corrugators need to invest in training their workforce, a sentiment also shared by the FCBM conference speakers.
Amidst competition from other Indian suppliers who have also collaborated with Chinese and Taiwanese machine manufacturers, Naresh believes customer satisfaction goodwill and trust are some of the qualities that Suba Solutions has earned from its clients in the past decade with a large installation base across India. In any packaging plant, it is essential that the equipment has minimal downtime during the operational hours. With a service team of 25 dedicated and experienced engineers ,Naresh says that proper service and maintenance for his clients is only a call away and iti s one of the reasons for Suba Solutions being a top choice for Indian converters.
The packaging industry in India in the flexible and label segments is performing much better than other segments but corrugation is lagging behind as supply exceeds demand. According to Naresh, the market is poised for a consolidation that could help to sustain and maintain amore profitable demand-supply balance in the long-term
