Hyderabad-based Pride Pack is setting up a new fully automatic 5-ply corrugated plant in Medchal which is expected to be operational by January 2016. “We have a manual corrugated plant in Balanagar, Hyderabad, which was set up in 1999. Today the demand is growing and our manual plant is not able to fulfil the market demand. So we had no other option but expanding our corrugated capabilities by setting up an automatic plant,” says S Janardhan Reddy of Pride Pack.
Apart from the manual corrugated plant, Pride Pack also has a big format packaging printing plant in the same area as the old corrugated plant. “We are a big-format packaging printer for all major corrugated companies in Hyderabad. With five printing presses ranging from 2-colorto 6-color, our daily print volume is about 3.5 lacs copies every day. Once
our new plant in Medchal becomes operational, this is going to increase further.” Reddy believes in delivering quality products and to meet his goal, he has built up his own prepress unit at his packaging printing plant. Only last year he bought a Kodak Trendsetter
1600 Plate setter to strengthen his prepress division. “The in house prepress division has helped us meet quality standards to a large extent. Also it has relieved us of dependencies on third parties for the plates,” says Reddy.
According to Reddy, the Medchal plant will also have an ink kitchen and discussions are going on about it. With an Ichikawa flexo folder-gluer 2.4 2FD box maker already installed at the plant, the company is expecting a couple of other machines from China to be shipped in to the new plant very soon. The 5-ply automatic line at the plant is from Yantai Harton Packaging Machinery. The corrugated produced at the plant will be supplied mostly to the liquor companies. “But we have plans to expand our catering segments and increase our volume in future,” says Reddy.
Talking about the industry, Reddy says that buying and selecting raw materials is a big challenge. “The corrugated market is very much fragmented because the initial investment is comparatively low. As a result there is a cut-throat competition between players. The only way to survive this market in a healthy way is to deliver quality products in short turn-around time,” says Reddy
