The USP Packaging Solutions stand at Indiapack/pacprocess in Pragati Maidan, New Delhi was a hub of activity with visitors showing keen interest in the different types of end-of-line printers on exhibit. Packaging South Asia met R Chandru, vice president – sales and marketing, for a discussion on the company’s experience at the event and how it sees the rapidly changing Indian market. USP offers coding and marking solutions for the entire spectrum of packaging—primary, secondary and tertiary. The company represents a number of overseas OEMs in India, marketing and selling high-end coding and marking equipment to manufacturers across different industries. It has a pan-India presence with a strong team of sales and service engineers stationed across all its branches.
At pacprocess, USP displayed its K-series Thermal Transfer Overprinters, which are among the most cost-effective and smart coding machines, offering optimum solutions to soft-packaging coding in a wide range of fields like food, pharmacy, daily-use chemicals and seeds. The other machine on display was the CoPilot 500 from Squid Ink. The printer can print superior quality high resolution characters on either porous or non-porous surfaces and offers a cost-effective solution to meet GS1 barcode specifications. Another Squid Ink printer that USP displayed was the competitively priced SoloPilot, which is a high resolution printing system, where the complete printer and ink system are engineered right into the printhead. In addition, there were other products including inkjet solutions that the company presented.
Chandru said that when it came to consumables like inks, USP played a crucial role in freeing the market from the clutches of OEMs who used to double up as ink suppliers for their equipment. According to him, it is due to the efforts made by USP that today this monopoly has been broken and up to 80% of the market now procures fluids for inkjet printers. This helps customers save anywhere between 30 and 40% without compromising on quality. USP supplies industrial inkjet fluids from the Simacolor range manufactured by leading German manufacturer, Simaco. These fluids are used by leading inkjet printer OEMs like Domino, Imaje, Linx, Videojet and others.
USP Packaging Solutions was founded by industry veteran Joseph R Kishore, who has over two decades of experience in selling and marketing coding and marking equipment among others. At a time when hot-foil stamping and self-adhesive stickers were the only accepted modes, Kishore made a major impact by helping businesses understand non-contact industrial inkjet coding. He successfully sold the concept of inkjet as a method of variable information printing system to the printing and packaging industry in India. Chandru sounded optimistic about the scope of growth in the coding and marking industry in India as the packaging market here is growing exponentially although coding and marking still has a long way to go. He said that the market needs to mature and that can happen only when stakeholders become more knowledgeable.
