Supporting garment industry in a big way, value addition-based jobworkers of Delhi-NCR are growing steadily with extensive plans for further expansion, new investments to improve their capacity. Though these jobworkers are witnessing impact of slow export, yet their hopes for further growth, an aggressively growing domestic market and an obvious cost reduction by volume production are the reasons that are motivating them to go ahead with expansion. These jobworkers are expanding in rotary as well as digital printing apart from focusing on best quality too.
A decade-old digital printing expert company, Rajdhani Creations, Gurgaon, recently expanded its capacity and also has aggressive plans for the future. Having a list of good clientele including garment exporters, domestic brands, sportswear manufacturers, home furnishing companies, it now has a total capacity of 8,000 to 10,000 square metres printing per day. Shashank Saraogi, Director of the company informed, “Recently, we installed Durst Italian machines for reactive printing (cotton and silk) which produce 600 square metres per hour. We also invested in poly machines of the same company which prints somewhere around 300 metres per hour (Durst Alpha 190 Series – 64 print heads, Durst Direct Disperse Sublimation: Alpha 180 TR). For all these installations, our total investment has been almost Rs. 10 crore. Moving forward, we might even look for print on wider width fabric, pigment inks or printers with higher capacities.”
Talking about the current market scenario, Shashank feels that the evolving sentiments are positive and he is one of the strong believers that the upcoming future will be digital. “Due to Government support and open market conditions, there is significant reduction in the prices of digital printing, especially compared to the previous years.”
Color n Style, a Noida-based printing and process house, is another ardent follower of the ongoing expansion trend, planning to expand its rotary printing capacity with an investment of around Rs. 4 crore. The company started rotary printing three months back. Its current capacity stands at 30,000 square metres per day. Girish Wason, Director of the company, briefed AOI, “We are planning to enhance our rotary printing capacity by next year. With the coming season from September to March expected to remain well, if things move according to our plans, we will surely expand our capacity.” At present, the company is witnessing more business in the domestic market compared to exports.
Another such Noida based company, Escott Apparels, offering knitted fabric and digital printing service, will also expand its digital printing capacity soon. Currently, having a capacity of 1500 square metres per day, the company wishes to do more than double, nearly 4,000 square metres per day. Working as a jobworker for digital printing, the company has 12 circular knitting machines, produces 4,000 kg knitted fabric per day (mainly lycra fabric) and supplies to garment exporters mainly. Sanjay Jain, Director of the company maintained, “For us, digital printing is not a fashion product but a commodity and we are treating it the same way for getting volume orders. Increased capacity will also help us to reduce the cost. Our good infrastructure for pre- and post-processing will help on cost saving.” Though he did not disclose the investment being made for this expansion, it is expected to be more than Rs. 1 crore. The company believes to have strong and long-term relations with its clients and happily does smaller orders too.”
“From last 8 months, there were lots of ups and downs like demonetization, GST etc. because of which business was not quite good but demand is still there and it should grow. It is all about how you sustain yourself and control your cost.” – Sanjay Jain, Director, Escott Apparels, Noida
Although Surat is giving strong challenges to digital printing companies everywhere, these jobworkers are quite upbeat about this tight competition and have adopted varied strategies to tackle the situation. Shashank of Rajdhani Creations claims of creating a mini-Surat in Delhi itself. He states, “Despite this competition, we were still able to convince our clients that our rates are a little higher than Surat as we give them quality service. And now, as we have more capacity, we will be able to charge even less. People no longer need to go to Surat for digital printing as we are giving the same service with the same set-up as Surat offers. We are not just giving back fabric with printing by Chinese or local ink, we are also adding extra value to their products by sharing our strength of product development. We are trying to make people aware about the kinds of designs which are in trend, and the colour graphics. We are also helping them on technical issues like shrinkage which has to be controlled and for all these, we have our in-house establishment and expertise.”
Color n Style’s experience of tough challenge from Surat has been quite different from Rajdhani Creations. Having ventured into digital printing last year with a capacity of 2,000 metres per day, ‘price’ emerged as a major issue for the company in the digital printing segment because of Surat’s stronghold. Girish avers that prices of ink and paper are still high. Additionally, Surat-based digital printing mills/jobworkers are working for the domestic market and have bulk orders while in Delhi-NCR, orders are normally for 250 to 350 square metres, so price can never be the same in both the regions.
“We have upgraded our laser machines with advanced software. Now we can also do damaging along with laser marking. Damaging is more in fashions, and to do it by machine gives an overall accuracy compared to doing it manually.” – Ajay Jain, Director, Rishab Print & Laser (Print 360), Delhi
Some jobworkers are upgrading their technology which is making them more effective with less investment. Delhi-based Rishab Print & Laser (Print 360) is one of them. Ajay Jain, Director of the company specified AOI, “We have upgraded our laser machines with advanced software. Now we can also do damaging along with laser marking. Damaging is more in fashions and to do it by machine gives an overall accuracy compared to doing it manually. We have also started damaging on Tees.” In the last one year, with this new strategy, the company has successfully added nearly 8 clients and plans to start its unit in Ludhiana also.
