Repro India Plans To Double Book Printing Capacity In FY18

Commercial printing solutions provider Repro India aims to double its capacity to 12,000 books a day from 6,000 a day in the current financial year.

The company is setting up two additional units in Delhi and Chennai with capacity of 2,000 books a day each, and further scale up its Mumbai facility to 8,000 books per day, its Executive Director Pramod Khera told BloombergQuint in a post-earnings interview. This expansion entailing an incremental investment of Rs 10-15 crore would be funded through internal accruals, Khera said.

India’s overall book market stands at Rs 1,200 crore and is likely to grow to Rs 7,000-10,000 crore by 2020, he said. The company hopes to maintain it’s revenue rate of Rs 2 crore per month by selling 2,000-2,500 books per day, added Khera.

The company’s debt has grown by 15 percent last financial year, however, its long-term debt has come down to Rs 75-80 crore, compared to Rs 100 crore some six months ago, he said.

The company, which registered slower export growth at 19 percent in the January-March quarter as against 33 percent in the year-ago period, has been witnessing signs of revival in export markets and has already booked export orders of $1 million in the first quarter of 2017-18. Going forward, it further expects better contribution from export to improve the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and ammortisation (EBITDA) margin.

Repro India narrowed its consolidated losses to Rs 5.45 crore in the January-March quarter as against that of Rs 9.55 crore in the same period a year ago. Cost optimisation techniques like reducing employee and finance cost mainly aided the company to narrow their losses, Khera added.

Corrects an earlier version of the video which wrongly named the company Repco India.