Yamir Packaging’s expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic

The Yamir Packaging Group started somewhere around 1975 in a small nook in Ahmedabad with basic stationary work. In 1984, the company moved to Bharuch where it set up its first packaging plant for monocartons and subsequently set up three more plants in the Bharuch industrial area over the past 30 years. Yamir, which currently has a turnover of Rs 110 crore, recently set up another sprawling plant with 55,000 square feet of working space in Kadi in Gujarat’s Mehsana district.

The name ‘Yamir’ comes from the Sanskrit word for the crescent moon which is also reflected in Yamir Packaging’s logo. Towards the end of 2021, the new Kadi plant started with a Koenig & Bauer 6-color Rapida 105 with inline coating, and postpress machines from Bobst. 

Yamir has carved a niche for itself in the food packaging space over its 47 years of existence and counts Amul, Hershey’s, Nestle, and Colgate among its top clients. Hyuma Mahadevia, the executive director of Yamir Packaging said to Packaging South Asia, that most of these client relationships have been cemented for 15-20 years. A monocarton specialist, all of Mahadevia’s plants also produce eFlute and other micro-fluted litho laminated cartons for the Indian packaging industry.

“We have a very small plant in Ahmedabad where we do many short-term pharma jobs and then in Bharuch, we have two plants which are into printed corrugation and produce eFlute and end flute cartons. Our mother plant is in Mandwa which is near Lankeshwar,” shares Mahadevia.

Yamir’s new packaging plant in Kadi

Apart from the K&B 6 color plus coater press, the new Kadi plant has the Bobst Novacut ER for die cutting, the Bobst Novacut E for stripping, and the Bobst Expertfold and Bobst Ambition machines for folding and gluing cartons. All the machines are around six months old, being installed at the end of 2021. About his long association with Bobst, Mahadevia says, “At our main plant, we had put up our first Bobst machine in 1999 and that machine is still going strong. We are talking close to 23 years of 24×7 service. What more do you want?

“The biggest thing which differentiates Bobst from others is that I can depend on them – they won’t go back, they’ll give me consistent production and consistent quality, and the breakdown is practically nil. One customer alone will take up 60% of my capacity at this particular plant (Kadi). That’s why we have the Novacut ER blanking and the Expertfold which is going to do just those jobs. And to support them, we also have the Ambition and the Novacut E – equipment to just balance the workflow of the plant.”

Expansion during the pandemic

All of Mahadevia’s plants are supplying packaging materials to the food and pharma segments. As a result, the firm received all the permissions and approvals to run the plant on day three of the Covid-19-induced lockdown and was also completely stocked up with an inventory of raw materials. The Group added eight big clients during the lockdown and had to put up two new plants to cover the resulting volumes.

According to Mahadevia, the Indian monocarton market is growing at roughly 8% CAGR. “A special segment for startups has been created where the designs are pretty trendy and have to look good and the volumes are very low. I think this is one area that the commercial guys are capitalizing on. With the new startups coming up and the single-use plastic ban, I think monocartons are here to grow,” he adds. Yamir Packaging is currently looking at replacing its older converting machines with newer Bobst models, before expanding operations to other Indian states.