“We are in the process of setting up our third facility with an installed capacity of 2500 MT per month in Hyderabad.”
Excerpts of the interview with Mr. Manish Gupta, Chairman & Managing Director, B&B Triplewall Containers Limited
Company highlights:
B&B Triplewall Containers Ltd is one of the biggest cardboard manufacturers in the country, producing boxes and boards with the highest quality and wide variety. Currently, we have two manufacturing facilities with a combined capacity to make 7,000 MT of corrugated boxes per month. Both the facilities put together, we have close to 3.25 lakh sq ft of the built-up area and have the capability to make 1.25 crore boxes per month in numbers. We cater to a wide variety of industries like e-commerce, FMCG, edible oils, automobile, engineering, paints, fruits and vegetables, agarbatti, beverages and many more.
Our biggest strength is the early adoption of world-class technology, for instance, we were the pioneers to bring in the latest European technology from Germany and France into India. The fully automatic factory at Shoolagiri, Tamil Nadu with a capacity of 5,000 MT per month is one of the single largest plants in India.
Further, the advanced technology brought in by machines from BHS and BOBST gives us an edge over our competitors in terms of quality and reliability. At present, we are in the process of setting up our third facility with an installed capacity of 2,500 MT per month in Hyderabad. This will take our total capacity to 9,500 MT per month.
Quality-related challenges & key expectations from paper mills:
- The Kraft paper market in India is still in its nascent stage and needs a lot of improvement. To start with, the mills in India need to improve the fundamental requirement of smooth runnability for the corrugators. This can only be achieved by giving a jointless reel or a reel with a properly spliced joint, no moon cuts, no profile variation of GSM as well as moisture and adequate protection of the reel like edge protectors and side guards and stretch wrap for safe transit.
- Secondly, in terms of quality parameters, the mills need to focus on the consistency of the quality as well as moving from a BF based structure to an RCT/SCT-based commercial structure.
- With light weighting being the future, the mills need to produce low GSM high SCT fluting paper. For the liners, they need to produce paper with single side calendaring to give a good aesthetic value to the paper as well as great printability.
- India is now rapidly adopting organized retail where packaging is going to play an important role. Going ahead, the corrugated inners will come into direct contact with fresh as well as packed foods and will reach the hands of the consumers. If the paper is not odour-free, it can cause a lot of problems for the brand owners. Today, only a handful of mills in India can confidently say that they offer odour-free paper which essentially needs to be the basic criteria.
Founded: 2011
Plant Size: 3,25,000 sq ft
Manufacturing Capacity: 84,000 TPY
30,000 TPY (Planned Expansion)
Current market situation and future:
- The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the world to a very large extent but we have adapted to this huge transformative change quite quickly. As the companies have figured the new normal in their segment of industry, they have transformed accordingly to fulfill the requirements.
- The corrugated box industry too has had its challenges, but in the overall scenario, this is one industry that has not been impacted as much as the service sector. There have been shifts in the consumption pattern of the buyers of boxes but the overall volumes have not been largely impacted. In fact, we believe that in the next five years, we are going to see sharp growth in the Indian corrugated box requirements and in the overall economy of the country.
Market trends and demand drivers:
- The market is moving towards higher and consistent quality papers. Newer and larger capacities in the paper mill segment coming up will have a significant advantage over the smaller and older mills that have not been upgraded.
- There will be a major demand for Kraft paper from the automatic plant sector which is quickly eating into the semi auto sectors pie of business.
- In the corrugated box segment, the e-commerce and fruits and vegetables along with retail ready corrugated packaging are going to be the biggest drivers of this segment in the time to come.
