India: Stovec Is Eyeing Overseas Markets, Aims To Be A Dominant Player In Textile Printing Machinery

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India: Stovec Is Eyeing Overseas Markets, Aims To Be A Dominant Player In Textile Printing Machinery

How is the business for Stovec and what are the areas Stovec is focusing on?

Last financial year has been reasonably good for Stovec in terms of topline and the profit has improved as a result of that. The market was kind enough to bless us with good number of orders as we offer best in class technology and solutions. Also, internally we have introduced actions that optimise and reduce cost which yield us good results. Hence, overall the year for Stovec has been good. As far as company's focus goes, Stovec is focusing now on the areas where the company has core competencies.

In addition to our rotary printing business, we shall be focused more on graphic printing, digital printing and also electroforming.

How is the journey been for Stovec and where do you see Stovec in next 5 to 10 years?

The journey of Stovec has been satisfactory from the time we have started the business as a small organisation four decades back. We have not grown in head count, but being a technology focused organisation we have achieved several milestones, with a turnover of Rs 800 million today. We expect that the next 10 years of Stovec will be full of activities to propel growth. Stovec will not only be the dominant player in India but will aim at the international markets with advanced product range. We have started offering our product range in Bangladesh and Indonesia and we would soon move to other markets as well.

We believe that Stovec can be a dominant player in the existing rotary screen printing business and at the same time we look forward to the digital printing area which is expected to grow at a much higher percentage as compared to rotary printing in the future. Going forward, Stovec will have a substantial share of this market. We have tied-up with an organisation that makes printers for the digital printing market. So, we are taking actions according to our goals and we anticipate that the market is likely to move partially from the rotary printing to the digital printing. In the developed markets like USA and Europe, it would happen at a faster rate while India may take few more years. At the same time, we have a conscious feeling that rotary screen printing would continue to co-exist which is definitely our main portfolio. Hence, Stovec is ready while the markets take technology leap from rotary printing to digital printing.

What will be the share of exports in the current financial year?

In this financial year, we aim to achieve 15% of our business from international markets while close to about 85% will be contributed by the domestic markets. But gradually in the next five years, we would expand the export earnings to nearly 35% so that we can reduce our dependency on one economy.

SPG is manufacturing machines in Europe and in India also. Is there any difference between the machines manufactured in these two locations?

Stovec is the only company of SPGPrints which has machine manufacturing outside The Netherlands. But we have maintained the same quality standards for the products manufactured in India when compared to SPGPrints in Europe.

Price wise, Stovec is much higher in the market, how are the customers responding to this? Are the Indian customers willing to pay higher prices?

It is the value for money what our customers pay for. As I mentioned earlier, Stovec offers top-of-the-line European technology and quality products at a competitive price which is lower than the European manufactured products from our competitors. Today, customers are quality conscious and understand this fact. Therefore, they are ready to buy Stovec products at a higher price than from our low cost competitors.

Is any new product to be launched in near future?

There are certain plansin the pipeline which will be premature to disclose at this moment. We are also making improvements in our present offerings and certain features in the existing portfolio will have further improvement. We would come out with a new product soon which will have enhanced features.