Koenig & Bauer strengthens its presence in India as leading packaging manufacturers adopt its advanced printing technology for higher efficiency.
India’s packaging printers are operating in a challenging market: they must meet rapidly increasing demand while simultaneously satisfying the highest brand standards. Koenig & Bauer – alongside its long-standing and highly successful sales and service partner on the Indian subcontinent, Indo Polygraph Machinery – demonstrated how technology can resolve these bottlenecks. The success of the exhibition week confirms the validity of their joint positioning as a “Partner for Profitable Growth”: leading Indian packaging manufacturers are investing, in some cases repeatedly, in high-performance technology from Koenig & Bauer to secure their competitiveness.
The core of the discussions with customers and interested parties at the fair was how printing companies can expand their capacity while ensuring increasingly stringent quality requirements are met. Canpac Trends, one of India’s leading providers of packaging solutions, sent a clear signal at PAMEX by investing in a Rapida 106 with seven printing units and a coater.
This system will serve as the technological heart of the new packaging site in Indore. For Karan Pursnani, Director at Canpac, it was not just pure printing performance that was decisive, but also replicability for repeat orders and within high-volume runs: reproducibility and brand-compliant results are the key factors for the new site’s strategy. Canpac now operates eight Rapida presses and is relying exclusively on Koenig & Bauer for this greenfield project.
Akar Limited (Silvassa) also used the trade fair to modernise its sheetfed offset fleet. The company signed an order for a new Rapida 105. With five Koenig & Bauer machines now in its inventory, Akar aims to achieve further growth through higher productivity and quality in the field of finished packaging.
Current market data proves that the technology has a direct impact on customers’ profit and loss (P&L) accounts. For example, after installing a Rapida 105 in 2025, the Miracle Group recorded a 45 per cent increase in production capacity. At the same time, the system’s intelligent automation ensured a significant reduction in waste. These figures bolster Koenig & Bauer’s claim of not just delivering machines, but implementing genuine growth drivers.
The technological market leadership of Koenig & Bauer is currently being confirmed by further milestones: with the installation of the first MetalStar 4, Koenig & Bauer is bringing the most modern metal decorating press to the Indian market. As early as 2025, the installation of the first RotaJET – the region’s most productive digital high-tech rotary press – set new benchmarks.
In addition to hardware efficiency, Koenig & Bauer addressed another pressing issue for brand owners at the Print Summit 2026: product piracy. Sascha Fischer, CEO of Koenig & Bauer (ES), presented a paradigm shift in his presentation “protected at print”.
A key technology of this initiative is varnish protect ‘aegis’. Based on Stegano technology, hidden information such as codes is integrated directly into the varnish layer. The great advantage for the production process is that no changes to the design or prepress workflow are necessary, and a single coating plate can be used for different customers and orders, massively increasing efficiency. Authenticity is verified simply via a smartphone app (‘a verification app – ava’).
This opens up a new business model for printing companies: They no longer just sell printed cardboard, but digital product protection as a premium service. The technology creates a ‘ghost loop’ invisible to the human eye, which makes counterfeiting more difficult and enables brand owners to track their products in real time.
Aditya Surana, Managing Director of Indo Polygraph Machinery, summed up: “Our partnership, which began in 1994 with the first Rapida, has developed into THE success story for the entire Indian market. From over 1,000 Rapida printing units to digital innovations, we are setting new standards together.”