Narrating the early days of Axis Enterprises and how they came into being a widely known distributor of desktop UV flatbed printers in India, Sanjeev Budhiraja recalls that they were established in the year 2009 in Ludhiana as a manufacturer of zippers for garments. “In search of new and innovative products for garment accessories, it was in 2012 we got the idea of making printed buttons. To materialise the idea, we imported a small desktop A3 flatbed eco-solvent printer which was modified from EPSON Stylus R1900,” he says, continuing, “It was not an easy machine to handle as 50 percent of time was consumed in production and 50 percent in maintenance.”

The search for Sanjeev for a stable printing system continued in 2014 and ended up with a desktop UV printer—XIS 1624. “XIS 1624 was a marvellous machine, instilling us to sell it rather than just printing buttons. This was how we started distribution of XIS desktop UV flatbed printers, gradually expanding the portfolio,” he recalls, adding that Axis Enterprises sold 75 machines in the first year of business. Then the figure escalated in the subsequent years as 120 machines sold in 2015, 130 in 2016, and 135 in 2017. At the beginning, the team of Axis Enterprises was of just five staff, but it has grown to 45 today, among which 13 are engineers for technical support.

Product range: Started with XIS desktop UV printers in 2014, the product portfolio of Axis Enterprises today has been fully expanded to all variants—desktop, medium-format and large-format. “We have the whole spectrum of UV flatbed printers in our present portfolio, starting from A4 size to 2x3m available in prices ranging from 3.5 lakhs to 30 lakhs,” says Sanjeev. He continues, “Three models of our desktop UV printers use EPSON printhead of 1.5 pl. In the portfolio, the mid-format models feature 8 RICOH GH2220 printheads stacked in three arrays to print CMYK + white + varnish together, which in turn make them different and better than any other conventional UV flatbed systems available in the market. And the large-format XIS machines in our portfolio are robust with RICOH Gen5 printheads stacked in three arrays to print CMYK + white + varnish together. On other hand, I can say our machines are 100 percent value for their prices.” Three popular UV flatbed printers in three formats from Axis Enterprises are: XIS2335-S (desktop), XIS53951 (medium-format) and XIS52513 (wide-format).

Key customers: Machines that Axis Enterprises supplies are known for being quality products available at reasonable or suitable prices for the Indian market. Apart from the signage and graphic art segment, the company supplies its range of XIS UV printers to 18 other segments, which include mobile cover printers, corporate gift makers, sports gear manufacturers, garment accessory makers, furniture houses, metal almirah makers, stationery producers, jewellery makers, wedding album printers, ceramic tiles printers and others.

“From the feedbacks of our customers, we come to realise that our machines have evolved very much to meet the standards that are the need of the industry. We have a well-trained after-sale support team to help our customers in resolving whatever issues they have with our machines,” says Sanjeev. In addition to printers, Axis Enterprises also provides their customers consumables related to UV printing. Till date, the company has installed more than 500 XIS UV flatbed printers all over India.

Future plan: Sanjeev feels that the prospect of UV printing is quite vibrant and they aim at penetrating into many other new segments where the technology can bring diverse range of newer applications. “Our future plan is to explore more new segments where our XIS machines can cost-effectively serve. In fact, we look at different levels; we want to introduce our machines to the benefits of everyone, either entry-level companies or high-volume production companies.”