Sumangalam Plans Manufacturing Plant in India for Toner Powder and Lamination Machines

With a sales force, including company’s own and contracted, of over 100, Odyssey provides their products all across the country. Sumangalam International has imported from reliable manufacturers from China with proven track-record of developing high quality products. In an interaction with Sharad Midha, President of Sumangalam International about the company’s new strategies and other initiatives.

Sumangalam International, founded in 1996 by Sharad Midha, President of Sumangalam, provides high quality compatible inks, toner powders, ink & toner cartridges and other consumables, under their brand name Odyssey. Today Sumangalam has 15 branch offices in different cities spread across India. Before launching Sumangalam, Sharad Midha, an MBA from Delhi University, had a wide and varied experience in the industry including his brilliant career at reputed organizations such as ITDL and Oriental Carbon & Chemicals Ltd.

Mr. Sharad Midha shares, “We are quite old in the imaging industry. We import from reliable providers from China with proven track-record of developing high quality products. We maintain good reputation in India and all our products are well-recognized and accepted by the customers. Our products have very good quality and on the other side our prices are very competitive, so there is no need of incentive schemes to the dealers. Next, we have a wide range of products that meet the needs of machines of different brands and models.”

With a sales force, including company’s own and contracted, of over 100, Odyssey provides their products all across the country. “We have over 7000 dealers across the country. Our sales department, via its sales force, deals directly with the dealers and so there is no need of distributors in our model. We have a dealer-network spread from Kanyakumari to Jammu. Only in the East, our presence is a bit scanty, but we have recently started expanding there as well. We are recording a good annual growth rate and the recent demonetization had no negative effect on us,” adds Sharad Midha.

Some observers believe that color segment is fast growing. In this regard, Sharad Midha believes, “Color segment is growing fast but still it forms less than 3% of the total print volumes. For us still black toner and ink remain the main business. We focus mostly on low-end photocopier and printer refillers who consist a mass market for our printer consumables. Only in case of color cartridges, remanufacturing has opportunity because there are no good compatibles, but volume proportion of color is extremely limited.”

With the rise of imaging industry, earlier there has been a parallel rise of the remanufacturing industry. What future holds for remanufacturing industry? On this front, Sharad Midha comments, “Nowadays, users of low-end printers and photocopiers prefer use-and-throw compatible cartridges over remanufactured ones, because it is easy to handle. Only at high-end remanufactured cartridges still have some scope. Today, even for the high-end machines, satisfactorily good compatibles have started appearing. Over time, compatibles have also improved in quality, so remanufacturing is shrinking rapidly.”

Now all the eyes are on the GST, which is expected to come into force from July 1, 2017. Regarding GST and their future plans, Sharad Midha believes, “If GST comes into force, it will be good not only to the imaging industry, but good for almost all the industries and will be good for the country as a whole. Our PM’s Make in India is very good as it will give a boost to the Indian manufacturers and will also provide employment to millions of people. We are planning to set up our own manufacturing plant in India for toner and lamination machines with a tie-up with a world’s leading company in China. We hope it will become operational in the first quarter of the coming financial year (April-June 2017). The output capacity of the plant will be a good quantity of toner powder and 7000 to 8000 lamination machines per month. We are happy with our growth rate and confident about our future.”