In January 2022, Robus India introduced its Direction series of folder-gluer machines, manufactured 100% in-house by Robus India and its R&D team to promote the ‘Make in India’ initiative. According to Robus, the new machine is tailor-made and has benefits like just-in-time delivery, best buy-back offer, ready to retrofit with proven in-line Braille unit, with easy to track daily production report and downtime in a mobile app, collecting table, and upcoming features like 4/6 corner attachment, etc.
Prem Viswakarma, who himself is an R&D guy who worked at Bobst before starting his own company Robus India, says, “Until recently, we used to get our folder-gluers designed in China as per our specifications based on the requirements and feedback of our customers. We then further customize these machines, if required, at our plant in India before finally dispatching them to our customers. In other words, we used to build our machines at Chinese plants – leveraging the R&D and expertise of both parties. So technically, we have never been an agent or supplier to any manufacturers in China.”
Robus India is now manufacturing folder-gluers entirely at its own plant leveraging its expertise and R&D. “As we continue to redefine the way customers produce their folding-cartons on our machines, our R&D team has recently developed new technologies which we want to keep exclusive to our manufacturing floor. That is the reason why we currently are not getting all our folder-gluers designed in China. We have been making a vast investment in R&D; finally, it has borne fruit. Manufacturing 100% in-house is also in line with our strategy to deliver ‘Make-in-India’ folder-gluers to our customers. With our new technology, we have started complete make in India of our folder-gluers with 100% India-manufactured parts and components,” said Viswakarma.
Further lauding his R&D team, Viswakarma said, “Thanks to our R&D team, we have been able to add to our machines new features which help reduce job change over time of our customers. People who were earlier losing 40% of their production time in job changeover are now spending only 10% of their production time in job changeover. Some important features of our machines are center conveyor up and down, motorized conveyor system etc. These features are being offered to our customers at a very reasonable price. R&D has been in our blood since the inception of Robus India and that is what enables us to manufacture machines of international standards.”
Speaking about the folding-carton market, Viswakarma said, “The folding-carton market is highly technology-driven and has been monopolized by a handful of companies through their cutting edge technologies. However, we have been able to break those technology monopolies and come up with similar state-of-the-art technologies on our own.
For instance, at CorrExpo 2021, we showcased our Braille machine, Braille 850. In India, now we are the only ones providing this kind of machine after Bobst. Internationally, many people are doing Braille work with various ways but it is not complied with as an international standard as yet. we can get all the parameters such as accuracy to match the international standards. The special feature of this machine is that it is developed in India”
According to Viswakarma, Robus India has installed a total of 289 machines in India and other countries till now to 82 customers. Vishwakarma reveals the company’s USP makes it outshine competitors. We are getting repeat orders because of service, commitment, and keeping the genuine margin. Our first customer, who had purchased a folder gluer from us, is still buying all his machines from us till this day. We are really proud of that. We don’t have a large sales team but we have a sizeable service team. The company gets more than 80% of its orders from word-of-mouth references from its existing customers.
