Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Kaptify Consulting investor relations team, I welcome you all to the Q4 and FY 2026 post-earnings conference call of Control Print Limited. Today on the call from the management we have with us Mr. Shiva Kabra, Joint Managing Director, and Mr. Jaideep Barve, Chief Financial Officer. As a disclaimer, I would like to inform all of you that this call may contain forward-looking statements, which may involve risk and uncertainties. Also, a reminder that this call is being recorded. I would now request the management to brief us about the business and performance highlights for the period ended March 2026, the growth perspective and vision for the coming year, post which we will open the floor for Q&A. Over to the management team.
Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jaideep Barve, and I'm the Chief Financial Officer of Control Print Limited. Welcome all of you to the earnings conference call for the fourth quarter of the financial year 25/26. We appreciate that you have taken out time from your busy schedule to attend this call. Thanks for being on this call. Mr. Shiva Kabra, the Joint Managing Director of Control Print Limited also joins me on this call. For the first-time joiners on this call, more information about our company can be obtained by visiting our website. Just for information, the detailed presentation has already been put up on our website as well as in the U.S.A. presentation notification on the exchanges for this call. Let me provide you some highlights on the performance of CPL for the period ended March 31, 2026. Revenues.
On a consolidated basis, the total revenue is INR 484 crores in FY 2025/2026. The figure for the corresponding previous year was INR 431 crores. Out of this, the operating revenue is INR 482 crores in 2025/2026, which was INR 425 crores in 2024/2025. On a standalone basis, the total revenue in the fourth quarter is approximately INR 138 crores, which is a good growth from INR 140 crores of the Q4 of the previous year. For information, the total revenue for FY 2025/2026 and the previous three years is INR 460 crores, INR 395 crores, INR 347 crores, and INR 295 crores. Regarding operating revenue on a standalone basis, it is INR 446 crores for the complete year of 2025/2026.
This was INR 385 crores in last year. Coding and marking continues to be the main and the most significant profit center of the standalone company. It has seen a steady growth in the business. Pipes, foil, dairy, cable and wire, FMCG, steel and metallic board are our top-performing business verticals. We continue to be the market leaders in cement, tire cord, shoe, and dairy. The business outlook remains good for the packaging solutions. We have developed new solutions, and acquisition of new customers is another plus point for us. We are getting good traction in the co-packing activities in the packaging division. A pipeline is being generated for the laminates co-packing and vending machines. Management of this division is now strictly controlled and operations are tightly measured.
The Mask Lab has now been operating as a PPE separate division, and along with masks, we are also engaged in the trading of hard hats, suits, helmets, gloves, blankets, and shoes. Expenses. On a consolidated basis, the cost of goods sold is around 40% of the operating revenue, which was 42% in the last year. Employee costs remain high, which is 23% in FY 2025/2026, which was 21% the previous year. Other expenses are around 16% for the current year and previous year. On a standalone basis, the cost of goods sold is around 41% of the operating revenue. This was 42% of the operating revenue for FY 2024/2025. Manufacturing costs continue to remain at 3% of the operating revenue. The employee costs are 19% in FY 2025/2026. This was 18% in the last year.
Depreciation and other expenses are in line with the previous periods and in line with the business activities of the company. That said, management remains committed to optimize all the costs and would look closely into the economy efficiency and effectiveness of operations. This review can definitely lead to reduction in the operating costs. The way forward, we would like to consolidate the coding and marking business by increasing the installed base, provide robust solutions. Just for your information, we have implemented a price increase. Reduction in the input costs and overheads also is being prioritized. We would be developing new solutions and capitalize the available market opportunities in the packaging segment. With respect to the packaging business, both in India and overseas, we are looking forward to increasing revenue in the printer sales, the co-packing and laminates.
Overseas subsidiaries will continue to be monitored with focused group targets. Business plans have already been mandated for execution. We now leave the floor open for any questions. We'll be happy to address them.
Thank you, sir. We'll now begin the question and answer session. All those who wish to ask a question, please use the option of raise hand, and we'll invite you to ask a question. We'll take the first question from Mr. Keshav Garg. Please go ahead.
Mr. Kabra, thank you very much for this opportunity. I am very concerned by the losses that our international acquisitions are doing, and the losses seem to be ballooning with every passing quarter. We have seen this story before Indian companies doing vanity acquisitions in saturated Western markets, and then continuously pumping money, making losses, and then ultimately just writing off the whole thing. Is there a different story over here or we are following the same predictable pattern that we have seen many times in the past before?
Keshav, this is Shiva. Thank you for taking part in the conference and for your question. I think that will be a concern for many other people also. You see, the thing is, I think, this is a fundamental question for me as a manager and for the shareholders also, or investors, however you want to term it. You see, there are two routes out here. We are in a comfortable position in our coding and marking business. When I look at the results, our profitability has increased on a standalone basis, fueled by the coding and marking business. Even though we have made investments in both the QRiousCodes, which actually probably wasn't at least breakeven this year, I would say, if not at a profit, but it was definitely at least breakeven this year.
We didn't probably spend money developing that business, but we did make losses in the packaging business in India. Now the question is, whether we wanted to be a TCS or Infosys type business. I'm not trying to say they're great companies or something, but, in the end, they've been making a lot of money in running a comfortable business model for 30, 35 years, but they haven't reinvested in creating IP. There are no products that they have per se. They're not leading in, say, the AI or something. They've not created any Zoho or SaaS type products. They've not competed with anyone in the last or done anything like that. The question for us is that there are certain types of companies and business models which are going in a certain direction.
We have felt that our coding and marking business has a certain limit, because the total business in India is still like somewhere between INR 2,000-INR 2,200 crores was our last calculation when we had the four of us, plus presumed something for all the other parts of the market. If that grows broadly about 10%, then 9%-11%, something like that, 10% on average, then the options for us are limited. We believe that we have the type of skills, we have the type of thing, and we've been investing aggressively in developing our own technology. We were licensing many things earlier. We were a distributor for, then we were manufacturing under license. We developed a lot of our own products and technologies in the last few years.
Just so you understand, the losses that you're talking about are almost entirely in the packaging division abroad. It's not in marking or coding technology, which are more allied with our current business. The main losses that we are having are fundamentally linked to the packaging business. That's a business that is not I wouldn't say, it's something that Rennco is not really doing that directly here in terms of packaging machines and packaging materials, right? We are supplying a different set of equipment than the packaging lines. The fundamental call out here was to invest in some technology which we feel has a differentiating factor. The investment cycle has gone a bit longer than what we expected. That's also because it has taken more time to stabilize the machines as compared to what we expected in the beginning.
The machine is actually stable, but in certain types of material development, in terms of certain other aspects that are there in those markets. Like I said, in the end, when we've done this acquisition or we've invested in this, we feel that the scope of this business is significantly bigger than that of our coding and marking business. We need to invest and have patience. We've gone on a certain route where we have said that we are comfortable building up our IP stack, and that's what our company wants to do. That's what we believe is necessary for the long-term health of our company, when we're talking over a decade-long period. I understand that, as an investor, as a shareholder, and even as a manager, I have to ask these questions to our board.
These questions were raised also yesterday and has been raised in a few other meetings that the rate abroad sort of makes the growth out here look very muted, and it's not that good. The thing is, it's a conscious path we've taken. We've got a bunch of key patents, not only, like I said, in our coding and marking business, which we've created over the last few years. We've done a lot of investment in R&D out there also. I'm coming from a different angle, where I've been paying license fees and royalties, and someone calculates that I've been paying INR 7, INR 8, INR 9 crores a year, INR 10 crores maybe, whatever it is, and we've been paying it for the last 10, 15, 20 years.
We are coming from the angle that we want to lead this new thing and get into new areas where we are the ones who are owning highly differentiated IP and building platforms on that. It's a very different type of a situation, and this change has been happening for a decade. We need to focus on our coding and marking business only, so nobody questioned it earlier. Now we are also getting more, like I said, into digital printing, into track and trace, and in pharmaceuticals. We're combining a lot of those technologies, and now we've got all the packaging industry also on that similar platform. Like I said, if someone is asking me, and I was just at interpack for about seven, eight days or something in Germany, I think there was a lot of strong interest in our product and our platform.
It's something that definitely, I'm still very sure of the end-use case. Everyone has to understand that when you're going down a certain route, we have to load a certain amount of risk and some sacrifice of certain short-term results, which we're trying to manage to the best extent possible in order to ensure that the company has multiple levers of growth and a strong platform over the next decade or two. That's sort of where the situation is. I don't know if this is answering your question in complete. There's no vanity here. We're not taking on certain things. It's a very calculative decision.
Wherever we have invested is to take certain types of intellectual property, where either we have some holes in our portfolio and we want to ramp it up in terms of Codeology, the print and apply, in terms of Markprint with the digital printing. It also fills some geographical options for us, maybe in the future. In the packaging business, again, it's an IP platform that we bought, which we really believe we can develop to be a significantly bigger business and a more profitable business than our coding business in course of time to come.
Mr. Kabra, I appreciate your answer, and I do understand that until we attempt to do new things, the company cannot grow. There has to be some end game that, okay, we are trying to do this, and if we are unable to do this in a certain time period at a certain cost, with a certain capital outlay, then we will basically write it off, and it will not be open-ended that after three years also, we are discussing the same thing. I think we are again putting INR 32 crore in the Italian subsidiary, whether through IPR purchase or equity infusion. It's basically the same thing that we are putting INR 32 crore additional capital. Basically, how much money did we put to acquire this packaging business? What has been the additional investment since acquiring it, and what has been the cumulative loss?
The basic point is that are we realistically going to get, in the foreseeable future, any return on all this investment that has been incurred till now, and by when?
Yeah. Keshav, again, like I said, this is not an open-ended type of investment. Obviously, in the end, we've got a certain bunch of milestones. The first thing is to have a very stable product platform, which has taken slightly longer than what we expected because what happened is, since we bought the company from liquidation, there was a lot more damage to their technical and quality and many other aspects that were there than what we expected. The IP, what we're doing is not a method of fund infusion. I will actually retract on saying that. We, in any case, have certain things that we've extended are not clearly in terms of the equity into what we've done. Of course, some part will be used to repaying our ourselves.
This is to formalize the fact that all the IP is now belonging to Control Print, not to Control Print Italy. We are also potentially going to be licensing this technology to other people. One of the options we are also looking at is whether to make it a platform and whether we want to do everything ourselves, or whether we want to make it a platform and even license it to other people. We can do both types of things in the Tetra Pak model, right? We can also license it to other people in certain geographies, or we can make everything ourselves. There are multiple options ahead of us. For that, we wanted this to lie with Control Print itself, I mean, the main Control Print product in India. That's the situation that's there.
I can assure you, these questions are asked of us, obviously, and like I said, our board is also very conscious. Mr. Kabra is very conscious of what is happening. He has a lot of questions to ask also. I can assure you that we are making significant progress, and it may or may not show up in the results at the time period that everyone expects, including me. I understand, and I have done this with two other platforms that we've done before. Now we're moving to three other options, like the track and trace. Now we can see the sort of results showing up out there. We can see the same thing here. Again, we've gone through a highly differentiated approach.
If we go for a less differentiated approach, and don't keep building out the platform, it's going to obviously probably give us a faster return. Like I said, the idea is to get something which can really take the company to the next level. I think that's where the thought is. Yeah.
Sure, sir. Thank you very much. I appreciate your answer, and I hope the company succeeds in our endeavors. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Madhur Rathi. Please go ahead.
For the opportunity, sir. I wanted to understand regarding the sharp increase in our employee benefit expenses on a standalone basis, because it seems that the investments in the track and trace had been done. What is this increase related to?
I cannot hear you clearly. Could you repeat everything, Sumul?
Yes, sir. I wanted to understand the increase in employee benefit expenses during the quarter from INR 20-21 crores to INR 27-28 crores. Why is this? From my understanding, are all the investments in Track and Trace have been done and the employee expenses were going to stabilize at those earlier levels. What has led to this increase?
I'll take that second part of the question first. As far as Track and Trace goes, I mean, we're continuing to invest. We have a team there. We continue to develop new products and IP. There is an ongoing commitment and an investment. Are we making enough revenue that it is break-even, maybe even profitable? You know, I can't disclose those exact numbers, but it is not If in the future, I mean, from whatever we are seeing, it's either gonna be at least break-even, if not profitable. It will be a contributor or at most neutral for the company. Now, the second part, which is the employee expenses. I, you know, Jaideep is going to ask this question.
Yeah. If you look at the numbers, you would feel the amount has increased. For a gradual approach, like what we've analyzed since November 2025, the new Wage Code has come into being. As a result, we had to recast the liability on account of leave encashment and the gratuity. Major chunk of the variance is because we have implemented the new Wage Code and the hit has been applied around. We have also done some good other provision for the sales and service people incentives and also some loyalty bonuses for key management people. The last two are basically in terms of keeping the business ahead and having the right people.
The first impact of more or less about INR 3.5 crores was because of that, leave encashment and the gratuity entitlements.
Got it. Sir, our standalone business has done a decent growth during this quarter. What has led to this growth? How much was the price hike that we took during the quarter? How much is from the demand that has come up? Sir, post GST, how is the demand for the coding and marking equipments in India? Has it picked up or how is it, if you could help us understand?
Yeah. Just so We can't give you % you know, numbers in terms of price hikes. We have implemented a surcharge, because, you know, it Right now, I think previous year there was a price hike, but the major growth has come from the volume. This year what's happened is, because of some further, you know, we've actually had some cost increases, some major issues happening with the Iran thing or something, some chemical supply chains. Because, you know, the gas and some other things are being allowed for petrol and fertilizers and all, but for some reason they've stopped the chemical stream. There's some cost increases for sure on our side. You know, and some cost margins have been declared here and there.
Obviously, I mean, it's not as bad as COVID by any stretch of the imagination, but, you know, we are keeping our stocks ready. We have had some significant cost increases. Also there could be depreciation has affected us, but we've not even calculated that as yet. We have taken a surcharge from our customers to counteract at least the cost of whatever cost increase we're gonna incur due to whatever this conflict, and whenever it ends, goes. You know, it's gonna take a few months for the market to normalize, even if the conflict ends tomorrow, as it were to be. I think the surcharge will be in place till the end of the year. There was a couple of other questions in there which I think Jaideep will address.
No, we do address it fully. He just wanted to know that how are we fairing in the coding and marking there.
Okay. Fair. Fair. Most of the growth last year was volume. Some small part was a cost increase. Yeah, this year there's a surcharge, but I don't think it's gonna. You know, it's mainly to cover the additional cost that we've already incurred. It's not, or are incurring on account of the depreciation and the whatever this Iran thing. I don't think it's gonna necessarily add to our bottom line, but it will prevent it from getting affected.
Yeah.
Sir, on the demand from the FMCG segment post the GST, changes.
[madhur], we can't hear you properly.
Sir, the demand from the FMCG market post the GST rate reductions, for the coding and marking equipment's?
It's difficult for us to say. It's been quite stable, you know, last year and this year. Normally the packaging sector, you know, just pharmaceutical, beverage, food and personal care, home care, FMCG, whatever you call it, is stable. You know, we see more ups and downs in the industrials, which is like, you know, cable and wire, pipes, steel, wood. You know, those are like the ones which fluctuate more. Because a lot of them are linked to home construction and, you know, white goods and those types of things. The packaging side of the business is quite stable, you know, like, I mean, people consume milk, come what may, you know. Whether it's a GST is there or not, they don't know.
I think, but I'm not sure.
Got it.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Sumul.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Vinit Thakur. I would request the participants to limit their questions to two per participants. Vinit, you may go ahead, please.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Thank you for giving me the opportunity, sir. I had a couple of questions. If you could give me the revenue breakup by consumable spares and.
Yeah. I'll take this question. For the Q4, I'll talk first. Between printers, consumables, space, and services, it is 12%, 62%, 9%, 16%. If I take the complete year of 2025/2026, it is 14% for the printers, 61% for the consumables, 9% for the space, and 15% for the services.
Since already my question was answered, I wanted to know about the Codeology and other investments in, especially V-Shapes, because we've been bleeding money for it, and as you mentioned, we don't have a timeline when we will have at least a break-even point for it. Could you explain the Indian business as well? What do you think about the Indian business as of right now?
You mean the Indian business, you're talking about the packaging side of the business, or you're talking about which part of the business?
The coding and marking business.
That's going steadily. I think that's steady so far. Last quarter or last year was good. This year should be also reasonably good. Like I said, we're expecting the track and trace to be a major call, or one of the things that we add to sales, hopefully profitability this year.
Could you
Even the packaging to be developed, to some extent, this year, and stabilized, where we can then have a base on which we can grow.
Could you expand more on the track and trace business? Like, what revenues or what is the highlight in the next two, three years? What do you think the potential of the business could be?
That's difficult to say. There are other people in it. We are a very late entrant to the market, relatively speaking. We're trying to offer something which is a very differentiated solution. It's quite technical. If someone will have to take the time out to understand what our solution is and how it compares to whatever is the state of the art from other people as of today. I can assure that any leading pharmaceutical or other similar company will find a significant amount of benefit coming to us. I had mentioned that we are doing some pilots with 2 of the top 5 to 10, in size, pharmaceutical companies in India. We're coming to the end of those, and if everything goes as what we think is successful, then we should get a bigger rollout in these companies.
That will also be market proof to the rest of the companies up in this field, or other rest of the customers. Yeah, that's where our focus is. It's not really been on rushing to try to sell to everyone. It's more of going into depth and really working closely with a few pilot customers, of large scope, complex requirements, probably the most complex requirements from all companies in India, and making sure that we are giving that level of solution to them, that they feel there's a huge delta and it's a no-brainer for them to switch from the existing solutions to us. It's more about proving the proof of concept in 2 apex customers, and we feel that it'll have its own self-explanatory effect down the line to all the other customers.
Sir, just a last comment on V-Shapes. What do you think about when can we reach a break-even point? What scale and what factors could it lead to reaching a break-even point? Just a general commentary on that part.
Yeah.
Be great.
It could be this year also. What happened was, we have predicted about a EUR 1 million something loss. This, like, reduction from about EUR 2.5 million last year to about EUR 1.5 million this year. What's happened is that, because of some difficulties in some design changes or some stuff that we've made, we've got a bunch of inventory there which still needs to go out to customers. We've not been able to build that. I think that happens, hopefully the losses would reduce. Also the revenues may start. We have a couple of big customers in the Gulf, at least who are not now purchasing materials because we can't ship them the materials. The delays in the Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz area, and we don't know how to get past this.
That's affected us to some extent. I think, yeah, it could easily break even this year. Irrespective, I'm quite confident the losses will reduce this year.
From at least after FY 2028, we will not be needing more money towards V-Shapes. Would that be a general consensus?
I don't think that we need to put more funds in after this. Since we purchased the technology and shifted to India, I think this will be the last, like you said, someone said, part of it is to feed some loans that we have provided to get them back. That's going to be part of it. Most of the funds are not going to be infused there, but I think, there's not much of a funds requirement from their side. If we believe as possible that the current inventory that they have is finalized and they can ship it out because all the changes have been agreed upon. We made some minor changes to the product. What's happened is that the products are still somewhat stuck in the factory, in their factory.
Yes.
If those products can go out, if those machines can go out, then we can convert them into revenue and get some money and, obviously, we already see part of it as an advance. Part of it will come in. They eventually get converted into cash, and it'll also lead the way to recurring revenue. Yeah, some improvements that can happen in terms of the manufacturing out there. I think we're close to saying that now this is the final change, because, look, again, I don't want to be critical of our own company, and it happens, something will happen. It's a new thing because we are run in a very different way. When you buy a certain machine from certain types of Italian companies of a certain size, that each machine is slightly different than the last.
It becomes impossible for an engineer to go there and understand which machine is what. There are no major changes, but there are minor changes from each machine to each machine. Our take is that this can't happen. It has to be finalized. If you go to the customer, you should be able to install it in one day, and give the training and get out, and it just runs. You can't be like, "I'm going to go there, and I'm going to fiddle around with it, and I'm going to make some things here and there." We are putting more of our own quality and customer level standards out there. Otherwise, they would have shipped out. That's not acceptable for us. I just want to be quite straightforward. Again, it's nothing negative or positive about it.
Maybe people are used to doing business a certain way, or we don't accept that, so they have to comply with our laws. That's that.
What is our land?
May I request you to rejoin the queue, please?
Yes.
We'll take the next question from Saket Kapoor. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Namaskar, Shiva. Shiva Sir and Jaideep Sir. Hope I'm audible.
Yeah. Namaste.
Yeah. Sir, first of all, a very humble suggestion. Please do make it into consideration that earlier, sir, we are forced to research. The concall and the presentation part used to be done on the same day, maybe at the far end at 5:00 P.M. or sometime around that also. We have now made it a next-day affair. If our team can work on it and we can host the investor call on the same day, later in the evening, if the board meeting permits so, that will suffice and would be very beneficial for the investors and the analyst community. That's a suggestion from my side, if that could be looked into and deliberated on.
Saket, we actually preferred that, but then some people said they need time to study the presentation and the results before they can ask us questions. I don't know, there are different investors with different.
Sir, you can
Prefer that, so I don't know.
In the paucity of time, I'm not taking this discussion. You have the similar set of investors participating in the call. The Kaptify can call us and get the feedback from us, what is the preferable time, since we people are participating and we people are investors also in the organization.
We do that on behalf of Control Print.
Yeah.
This on the end of the call for us, it's actually better to do it all in one day. It's much better for us.
Yeah, it is much better for us also, sir.
Okay. We got a different feedback, but I'm just telling you, Saket, that this was the feedback that we got. That's why we have changed to give everyone a day to study the results and the presentation before asking us questions. We are more than open to going back to the old style. I'll leave it to Vinay to get the feedback and let us know.
Right. Yes. Sir, sir, taking into account the V-Shapes losses, the packaging business losses, can you explain to us, sir, what is the nature of these losses? As you mentioned about some machines and not getting delivered because of some changes in the specification. What are the course correction that are expected, going ahead, if you could just dwell further on the same?
Yeah. Roughly speaking, about half the V-Shapes' expense is in terms of R&D. Okay? The focus has been on shifting the R&D, India is going to do the materials R&D, and V-Shapes will keep developing the machine technology and also extending our patents into other areas. Like, for example, we have a patent for taking our snap technology to powders. We develop a thing where we develop a powder machine, which we're far from finalizing and selling, but we've taken the patents out on that as a concept. That will extend, say, till 2044. One part of the thing is to develop the technology to extend our IP. That's about half the cost of running V-Shapes in Italy. Okay? The other half of the business, what they do is 2 things similar to India.
They do contract packaging for customers. This is more because a lot of customers don't want to buy the machine upfront. What they do is they'll pack 100,000 pieces or 50,000 pieces and try it out on the market and do things like that. If everything's successful, it's going to come back to us, and then look at purchasing the machine. That's one way. What they do is a second thing, the main business, of course, manufacturing the machines. Their sales geography now is limited to Europe. India is taking care of Asia, Pacific, and Middle East, and Africa. Although, maybe our real focus is, I'll say 90% is India and, to some extent, the Middle East and Gulf. It's not really, Africa and the rest of Asia is theoretical as of right now.
Their costs are obviously in terms of two things. They've got a sales team out there. Some people in the packaging and manufacturing production operation. They've got some part of the cost in the R&D. I would say if the R&D cost is something in the region of EUR 100,000 plus a month. Obviously we are expensing the same bill. That, theoretically, we would have capitalized or something. Because this is our financial way of doing things, that's a big investment that we are making there. In a way, they've got a similar R&D expenses what Control Print has, a little bit less than us. Because obviously they don't have the same level of revenue and profitability, they can't expense that without showing losses. That's one of the major differences there. The rest of the people are salespeople.
You got a CEO who also looks at the sales and some of the technical aspects. A couple of people work manufacturing, some logistics and back office or whatever, and then some people. It's a pretty thin team. I think it's like just 12, 14 people there totally. Also, part of the R&D costs are not only our people, but also we have some consultants that we use and then certain kits and tools that I know that they keep buying some stuff here and there to check some stuff out. Yeah, so that's where the V-Shapes or the CP Italy costs come from. What are the other questions you had, [kapoor saket ji] ?
Sir, I have couple of them. I'll just put forward them and then join the queue. Firstly, about the new manufacturing unit at Guwahati.
Yeah.
What kindly noted, sir, how are we going, I think with the packaging segment itself. That has some correlation with the IP which we have purchased, I think so far from V-Shapes. Sir, secondly, to endorse or whether to second to the views of Keshav Bhai also in the earlier part. Sir, you have built up this organization and also the confidence in your investors, in a journey that has transcended for the last six, eight years of consistent performance, delivering your dividends, buybacks. Somehow, it appears to the minds of your investors that we are getting derailed from the objective, and that is very well reflected in the type of peak compression that we see currently with respect to our current market cap also.
Sir, although in your presentation, you have spoken about, I think so slide number eight, it speaks about three pronged long-term growth strategies. Then, we have also spoken about long-term value drivers. We, as investors, only want things on ground to move in this aspect. We would like to understand as we say in the Hindi terminology, how far are we away from achieving these two, slide number seven and slide number eight. Your thought process of how confident you are in achieving the same. This is what the sum and substance of my question was. I join the queue.
Okay, just looking at the first question, do you want me to take these now or take like the end of the queue? If anyone else wants, I'll just take them now, if that's fine with everyone, or you want to take them at the end?
Sir, I think we can take a question from Saloni Arya from Molecule Ventures.
Yes, we can.
Saloni, if you can go ahead, please.
Keep those two questions there then. We'll address them also.
Yeah, sure.
Hello, am I audible, sir?
Yes, Saloni.
Yeah. Sir, I joined a little late. I don't know if my questions are repetitive. I'll just say them out loud. First one obviously being related to the losses that we are undertaking in the subsidiary. When can we expect these losses to subside? In the earlier call, we mentioned it's in H2 FY 2027. What is the trend we are looking at for the next two quarters? Second question is with regards to the track and trace business. Earlier we used to mention the market size of this business to be around INR 500 crores. Four key players are already in this, so what kind of a market share are we looking to capture from them? Basically, over the next two, three years, what kind of revenue are we targeting from this segment alone?
Is it going to be a meaningful contributor once the pilot commercializes, or it will take longer than that? We have never talked about the margin profile that this business can do. If you could disclose that, it would be really helpful. Sir, total investment done in the V-Shapes specifically
Saloni.
Hello.
Yeah, if you can just hold, keep your question. If I just can answer them, because I'll forget your questions by the time I answer the first one.
Okay.
If you can just understand, I'm a 47-year-old guy with a very short memory.
No worry, sir.
The first thing, the first question that you asked, I believe, has been answered.
Right.
I think to some extent, Saket G has asked a similar question again. We're going to revisit this at the end of the investor call, I believe, once all the other, because we have finished through the two questions and so it might be coming towards the end. If you have a little patience, we'll come to it towards the end. Now, the second part is about our track and trace business, which also has been addressed to some extent. We started this thing about five something years ago. Again, I'm saying the same thing for the packaging business. It's been four years of investment in that business, creating IP in that, and sort of understanding where the market is, where it maybe want to be. Like you said, yeah, it is an INR 500 crore business currently.
Again, like I said, we're looking at redefining the way we're addressing that market. It's not only a conventional track and trace solution, which is, we're already at a certain level where we are breakeven, if not profitable in the conventional part of the business. We've been working more on sort of a IP-differentiated solution in that business. Just so that everyone understands my way of thinking, we had a track and trace we developed. We spent some money developing it. We found a team that had developed a blockchain-based track and trace with a QR. We downed our solution, we went from them, we got that team. That team became our team in the Juris course team. We invested more in developing the product around them. We thought it was there.
We've worked with them for the last three something years, we've put a lot of money in that, and we've developed our thing. We've given a lot of printing and other types of R&D and other expertise to contribute to them. A lot of the expertise that we've also acquired through Markprint. It is bringing different parts of Control Print together. I guess we've come to a level where we are breakeven, if not profitable. I can't disclose that we're not making losses in that business. In general, whatever we do in terms of any business, is at a similar gross margin level to what we do in our coding and marking business, at least. The point that would then raise was, what is the size of this business, and what is the scope of this, and what is the market share?
For us, it's to create a product, like I said, when we are not afraid to. We know that we can make a product, we can sell it as Control Print, we can do another meaningful business and get a share. I think someone's mic is on, and they need to switch it off, because there's some background noise coming through someone. I think what we're trying to do is, create a IP-differentiated solution. Okay. We're all very content doing the same thing that we're doing. In the coding and marking business, we've done it. We've established a big, proper market share. We've still got great options and great solutions in the coding and marking business, just enabling us to continue growing. We've got a lot of profitability there.
In other segments, we don't want to just use the Control Print reach to make a me-too solution, which could probably be profitable and give a basic return on equity, but that's not our philosophy as a company. In terms of the way we're going to be in two, three years or something, I think I'd pondered that we've got two pilot projects that we are running, with two of India's largest pharmaceutical companies. We're coming to the end of those pilots. If we feel all of us agree, meaning the customers, but also us, that we're getting the results that are giving them a significant delta over whatever they're currently employing, then I think there's a firm commitment to implement our solution and scale it up in those companies. If that's the case, there will be obviously a significant growth driver for us in this year.
It will also sort of re-establish the standard of what can be done and what should be expected in a track-and-trace solution, of the level that Control Print delivers. We believe it will also affect the rest of the market and hopefully make it much easier for us. We think that customers will be coming to us rather than us going to them, post that, if this happens. The proof of concept is that the customer has run the pilot, he's done everything, he's doing the market testing, and he's finding it successful. Again, I can't give exact numbers. We don't give predictions on all these types of things. In terms of, I guess, in margins, I think overall, Control Print should be able to maintain its margins overall.
Like I said, if someone needs to understand what our solution does, first of all, I don't know how much we can disclose because most of our stuff is covered under NDA. If we can disclose some general stuff, you're more than be welcome to do that. Again, like I said, it's a very IP-based platform, which is differentiated. For that, someone has to be willing to invest time in understanding the differentiating point between us and our competitors or whatever is there right now in the market. That's the second question that you asked. Now you want to ask another question, so I'll please go with that.
From my end, I'm in a public place, sir. Third question would be, you can't even give the ballpark figure regarding the V-Shapes and track and trace business as to how much you expect them to be a part of the overall revenue mix more than, let's say, next three, four years. A ballpark figure could also give us some sense as to where the management is directionally going.
Okay, I think there's some overlapping questions. I think Saket has asked an overarching question on this basis. If I can just cover this, or if you can make that a point, Saket, of your question, so I can specifically address that point, that would be good because.
Okay. Sir, just one last question on my side, sir. Sir, you said that once the negotiations are done, you will be coming out with a presentation on track and trace business itself. When do you think we can expect that?
We already have one. We have a clear one. It's for customers. What our specific differentiating IPs are. Right now, we give it to people who've signed an NDA with us. Yeah, we can put on a general purpose track and trace. Must be on our website. Someone can do it. Yeah, sure, JD, you can just put it up, a standard presentation.
Yeah. A generic one.
We just put it up on the website. We can do that.
We can do that.
We can do that. That's not a problem.
That'll be the early stage, no?
But also understand
Sure.
Yeah, if anyone needs to.
Yeah
A specific thing of what we're doing with specific customers, we obviously can't disclose what we do with specific customers.
Right.
I'm sure a lot of you guys are analysts for some of those customer investors and some of those customers. Maybe you can speak to the customer directly. They will be better explaining what. Because it's better to actually get it from their point of view, right? Rather than getting it my view of what I'm trying to sell or what I'm trying to pitch to them. It's better to understand what they are thinking and why they are doing this, and how they're evaluating the set of folks. I think that's far more valuable than what we might say. Yeah.
Makes sense, sir. Just one last question, and I'll.
Please.
Please go ahead.
Get size of this product, basically. We have said that it was top 300 drugs have been already mandated, government is increasing it to 1,000 drugs. The execution on the government side has not been that strong. As it is a compliance cost from pharma company's point of view, how much of a market size increase are we expecting in the pharma space for this track and trace?
In the top 300 medicines, we're already doing about 20 or something, 2022. The government is going to come out with a notification in our discussion with the DCGI to make to 946 of the top medicines of India. Why 946? I'm not quite sure about. This is what the preliminary discussions that are going on. I'm assuming these are public. If they're not, I take that back. This is the discussion that's come out right now, to extend to 946 medications. The fundamental issue is that there's no standard in terms of the fact that we own a QR code, which goes to the manufacturer site to validate it, whether it's working or not.
What's happened is, I believe, there's been a lot of instances where people have scanned the QR code to authenticate the medicine, but the medicine was counterfeit because the entire batch was copied and released out in the market. What that is doing is, it's giving a false sense of security to the customers. You scan the medicine, it's saying it's authentic, but it's not actually authentic. This is one of the main issues our solution is addressing at the heart of, so that everyone knows what we're doing in a differentiated manner. You get 100% accuracy. Even if there's 1 million copies out there, the one authentic will come out.
We also have some other parts which are, because since you're already doing the track and trace, which is acquiring warehouse, supply chain, and other types of information, or some other types of management for the thousands of the companies, so they can use all this data to manage a lot of their logistics, supply chain, diversion issues, and other types of things. Just so you get an idea, there is a talk to make it 946 medicines, but there's no notification yet. We don't know when it's going to come out to be this thing. There are some issues in the first 300 medicines in terms of the fact that the objective was to eliminate counterfeiting. It's in fact gone a little bit the other way. It's giving customers a false sense of security that it is genuine.
Actually, it's not genuine. It's not really helped so far. The objectives have not been achieved. I don't know. I know the government does want to extend it, but at the same time, there's also some more discussions of how the solution is going to be improved so that it's far more difficult for people to make counterfeit copies of these types of medicines.
Thank you, sir. We'll move on to Samarth Singh, and I request the participants to limit their questions to one per participant. Samarth Singh, you can go ahead, please.
Thank you for the opportunity. Shiva, just circling back on CP Italy. I think in the last quarter call, we had also mentioned that we had some quality control issues, and we would to get CP Italy to have the similar quality of Control Print and, hopefully, after that, post that, the backlog would be taken care of. I realize, I guess three months isn't a long time, but it seems those issues are still continuing. If you could just talk exactly where we are as far as the quality control issues are concerned, and when do we start seeing us fulfilling that order book?
Yeah. Some of what's happening is right now it's not so much of a quality control issue. What happens is, say, we made a batch of 10 machines. Part of them are already sold, so a significant chunk of them are sold. Now, the first machine that came was sent to a customer, but some issues were there, because the testing wasn't as thought of. The engineer has to go. He's gone there four times already to make some changes to the machine. Now it's running fine. The second machine, we had to sell to a customer in India. It came to us, we are having some issues with it, even though we have a strong technical team here, and we can't send this to our customer.
We had to send the machine that we have in our own stock for our co-packaging to the customer instead. Now the third machine or the fourth machine and the fifth machine are ready. You know what's happening is in the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth machine are all slightly different from each other. They keep improving the machine. My point is all 10 machines have to be the same. Whether we go retro to those four machines and the next five machines or whatever, everything has to be the same machine. It has to be tested. It has to work. I am not saying that I know this sounds like math 101 or something to everyone, like it is obvious.
The reality is that sometimes people make things and they make a product, and then they make minor changes and they release the product and make minor changes. I think of Tata had the same thing with their cars. Like earlier, you introduce a Tata car, and everybody was saying the V2 is going to be good. Just wait till the V2 version comes out of all these cars, and then buy the Tata car. Again, a lot of respect for Tata Motors as a company. Please don't take it in the wrong way. I have no problem saying this to Tata. They're a customer of ours, very big customer. You understand, I'm not saying this had this reputation like a decade ago, and then they've gone through that and resolved that. It's first time right.
What's happening is, it's a very similar story that's happening out there. For us, it's not possible to manage customers in multiple geographies, managing multiple things, send out a product, and then make some changes to it on the fly. Our instruction is that all 10 machines have to be made, all 10 will work exactly the same. All 10 have the same Bill of Materials, the same parts, the same design, the same everything. Just small things, like they can make a change in a part, and they don't update the BOM with that same drawing. You know?
Right.
What happens when we make 10 new parts of that, we make with the old drawing. Someone has changed the drawing, we're like, "We've got a part, it's matching, it's not working because we've got something with the thing." To be honest, like, frankly speaking, it's very small stuff. It's like what happens, you buy an R&D outfit, frankly, which is posing as a company, and then they're not really thinking in the same way as a company.
Right.
That's what the challenge is. It's taking us a little bit of effort. The thing is, I'm not willing to send anything out that doesn't meet our own internal standards. You need patience.
Got you. You mentioned that we are spending about, I think, €100,000 a month. Is that the main expense? That comes about INR 12 crores a year. Is that the total expense for CP Italy?
That is just the R&D expense. That's not the total expense.
Okay. What would be the total expense? Not including, I'm not talking about the COGS, just the OpEx and the wages.
I don't understand that exactly. I'm saying the R&D expense is in the region of EUR 100 something thousand a month. Our main expense will be higher in India, that of course, that is more for the coding and printing business.
No, no, I'm just talking about CP Italy. What would be the total expense on the OpEx and the wages and CP Italy for the year?
Yeah. The direct wages are not very high. I think they're like EUR 1 million or something, maybe less. It's difficult to say because we have a lot of consultants and other types of things. Some people are on contract because we prefer not to take people.
It's something about €750,000 a year.
Is the fix.
Yeah. It's the total cost out of which the R&D.
It's contractual costs. Yeah. Then R&D, other things will be all additional. Yeah, again, like I said, we do some stuff. It's not the total cost. Yeah, it's not a very huge cost. It's maybe like EUR three something million a year. Somewhere between EUR 2 million-EUR 3 million a year to just run the show there.
Yeah.
Yeah, out of which EUR 1 million is R&D, and I'd say like EUR 1 million-EUR 1.5 million is all the, whatever, the power and the sales team and two logistics and admin team and two guys for the production. There's a few guys for production and technicians and that type of stuff. Yeah, maybe like somewhere between INR 2 million-INR 2.5 million would be like the fixed operating cost, assuming like, yeah, there was no purchases or manufacturing. We just had the people sitting around with all these types of things. Yeah.
Is it possible to restructure some of this cost and bring it onto the India operations? Our tax rate on a consolidated basis is close to 40% at this point.
There is some work going on on that side, in terms of the machine. Like I said, first we need to make the machine 100%, and say, like this is the final machine. Otherwise, I'll keep making some new machine in India or some new parts for those machines in India and so on and so forth. It's not like we're planning to reduce the size of that office because now we have slimmed down a lot of the additional costs that are there. We have three, four people having that go and do some other things are there, but you can see all the additional fat or the non-productive people and expenses have been cut. I'm going to see some more differentiation there.
It doesn't look like the costs have come down so much, but we've gotten rid of a lot of the non-productive people and where the investments have been made is much more on the sales team and getting a much higher sales type of an output out there. Definitely, I'm expecting much better sales results, the revenue results from them going forward. As far as getting the cost of the machine down, for that, we have to say that this is the final product, and it's not going to change till we make a new version, whenever we make a new version, and update the car. Till I don't say that this is the Toyota Corolla 2024, and this is fixed, and Toyota doesn't sign off that, we don't come with a Toyota Corolla 2027.
Yeah, we've got a machine that's theoretically been fixed, but obviously, the final things there. I think we are very close to the final stages of this machine being fixed, this batch of 10 coming out, us observing that. The plan is that, switching between what's happening is all these parts are bought from local Italian suppliers. Okay. It costs us significantly more than if we could source some of these parts through our base or manufacture them ourselves or at least negotiate with our suppliers if they're bought out, things like specific motors and price and things like that. That's the idea to get the cost down for future batches. Yeah, there's already some significant amount of work going on out there.
I think because there's some minor changes, it's been a little more of a difficult process than we originally envisaged.
Thank you.
It will happen. It's just step by step.
Appreciate that. Thanks.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from Nikunj Bhanushali. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm audible?
Yeah, you are.
Firstly, I would like to know some numbers in terms of our acquired companies. In Codeology and Markprint and CP Italy, what was the sales numbers for the entire year, FY 2026, and what are the profit or loss numbers, for the year 2026, FY 2026?
Again.
Yeah, sorry.
We don't normally give it for the specific subsidiaries. I think it might come out in the annual report. We disclose whatever is required to be disclosed. Like I said, almost the entire loss or the entire loss is around CP Italy or the consolidated losses outside of India. Just, I mean, obviously, I guess that's an interesting point that everyone wants to know. Yeah, the entire loss can be ascribed to CP Italy.
Sure. The reason behind me asking about individual numbers is that, from the past year, we have not been able to grow our top-line as well. Expenses and losses are one thing, but what I want to really understand is what top-line growth are we envisioning for the future, in terms of our subsidiaries, in terms of Markprint and Codeology specifically, because you mentioned that they are right on the basis of breakeven and even profitable. What top-line growth are we envisioning there, in terms of percentages maybe you can share, and what are we targeting? What sales figures are we targeting there?
Yeah. Again, we're expecting some growth there. Some low 15%-20% growth rate, I think that's what we would expect there, in both Codeology and Markprint. In CP Italy, I think there would be some better growth if we could sell some of the machines that we have sold, but actually sell them by shipping them out, I think it would be better, or it would have looked a bit better, at least, optically. For Codeology, just so that everyone knows, we've taken the print and apply technology from them, we've transferred it to us. Now we've got to integrate our own thermal transfer in it, operate engine.
What will happen is that will also lock the consumers for them and for us, that if someone buys our print and apply whether from them or for us, the consumer's business will come to us recurringly in the future. Print and apply is also, although India is not as big a print and apply market surely as abroad, it's a growing segment in India and, Rotech is not there in the segment. Just in the recent sales managers meeting we had in April, we sort of did the first reading for the print and apply, and we're expecting that although it's slow, we will get off the ground in this year and, start the print and apply sales, which in the future years will be an additional product in our coding portfolio and help us maintain our growth rates.
Like I said, for Codeology, we have done an analysis of their business, in all honesty, we have asked them to scale down the core business, because we feel that the types of margins, there's not an operating leverage. If they grow from INR 1 million or INR 1.5 million or whatever they were, if they become double, it's not like the profits will become three or four times. It's a bit of a tricky situation there. They themselves believe that the V-shaped packaging business has the maximum amount of scope in.
UK
In the U.K. and those areas. They will be doing the sales for U.K. and maybe even Scandinavia and Benelux or something like that. The bulk packaging there, so they are more focused on scaling that up and scaling up a couple of our coding and marking products in their market. We are actually going to make it more profitable by scaling down, reducing and do some restructuring there, getting rid of some of the excess costs, making the core business more profitable by making it a bit smaller, which is a bit counterintuitive, but the cost should come down faster than the drop in revenue as a result. Refocusing our resources on the packaging business and a couple of select parts of our coding and marking business. That's the plan with Codeology. With Markprint, they've already got some good contracts.
Like I said, what happens with these companies, it's a bit tricky to say because a lot of them are lumpy businesses, but they've got a couple of good things going on right now, and hopefully that keeps going on. I think we should see some strong growth. They had some technical issues themselves in a couple of installations last year. Those installations are like a multi-million euro potential. If that continues to roll out, even without getting any new customers, they just continue the rollout, I think they will strongly grow at 20%, 30% a year. That's fine. Yeah, that doesn't mean, of course, we are trying to push them to get additional customers, additional things in the meantime. Yeah, I think those businesses are less of a concern.
CP3 is the main focus for us because that's obviously where the losses are concentrated right now.
Okay. Thank you for explaining that.
The Markprint technology has been largely, I think, consolidated in Control Print. We are using that now quite extensively and also in some of the solutions that we are providing our customers. It has been contributing to us in the last couple of years. Now, definitely, I think that the level at which we've integrated has increased, and we are providing it at a much higher level to our customers.
Okay. In terms of printers, can you help me with the number of printers that was sold in this particular year?
For 2025/2026, you mean to say?
Yeah, for FY 2026, yeah.
Yeah. It is about 3,064 printers.
Okay. 3,064 printers. All right. Yeah, I think that's it from my side.
Yeah. Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you. Sir, we'll take the last question from Hardick Bora. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, am I audible?
Yeah, you are.
Yes, Hardick.
Yeah. Hi, thank you. Shiva, just one point on the coding and marking business in India. Notwithstanding the caution that you've said that you need to focus on these other businesses before significant slowdown or maturity comes to this business. Actually, the business has been doing pretty well. Even when you see the performance in FY 2026 on profitability, printer addition, as Jaideep mentioned, we have 3,000-plus printers sold this year. The metrics seem to be pretty encouraging there still. Trying to tie it back to your initial remark, like these large IT companies who probably took a little time to wake up to the AI threat and invest in that area, do you feel that compared to 5 years ago, the growth opportunity of the coding marking business has meaningfully slowed down, that is why you're focusing on these new technologies? Or it's just out of abundant precaution?
The coding business is still doing well. You're just trying to preempt the slowdown that might come 10, 15 years later, and hence you are trying to seed these new technologies today. Just wanted to get a sense on how are you looking at the coding marking business's growth potential compared to what it was, let's say, five years ago.
Hardick, if I can ask you some questions, what is the market cap of TCS and Infosys and Wipro and Cognizant and all these guys? Then what is the market cap of Nvidia and Microsoft and Apple, and even new guys like Salesforce or Oracle or those types of guys who own the IPs. They own the products or SAP or all those types of guys. Where do we want to be? That's a fundamental question for Control Print. Yeah, we're strong in the coding and marking business. It's generating the cash flows. It's our roti, kapda, makan, butter chicken, dal makhni, whatever you want to call it today. I'm not denying all those things. That doesn't mean, at least for us, we still feel that we have that capability.
We are one of the few companies that have a strong tech team out here. We're doing a lot of our own R&D and development for the last 10, 12 years, so we are confident of that path. We are very much in a different sort of situation. Like I said, when we see even Chinese companies, they're able to create their own technologies. If I look at Huawei or something, in all honesty, their products are fantastic. They've created a lot of their own IP around telecom and other types of things or something like that. I think, if I look at pharmaceuticals, how many Indian companies, in spite of being large pharmaceutical manufacturers for the last 30, 40 years in the genetic space, how many of them have created new chemical entities besides Wockhardt?
I don't know of a single company that has created a sort of phase III molecule, even focused on that business. I'm saying even focused on creating that business. I think, for me, the thought is very different. Like I said, it's not that the coding and marking business is bad, it's that we have that capacity in us to do much better. I personally feel I have the juice in me to still be motivated to work and do something rather than being like, "No, I'm getting a comfortable growth in the coding and marking business, and I want to focus more on my lifestyle," and that other type of thing. I think our team is still strongly motivated to keep pushing our own boundaries.
We understand that there's a certain lumpiness and an up and down that's going to come with that, especially with the size of company that we are. We could manage it much easier in the coding and marking space. Like I said, when I look at the fact that we probably made INR 100 crore-INR 150 crore in royalties over 20 years, and if I look at the today's cost of that, and if I look at the present value of even being INR 3 crore-INR 4 crore, 20 years down the line, or say INR 9 crore, whatever it is, after we negotiate the agreements down, and those royalties have come down because we've developed some of our own technologies in the meantime, so we don't need to license them anymore. CIJ, which used to be like 90% of our sales, now like 60%.
40% is at least our own inbuilt type of solution. What's happening is that I'm obviously my own experience, my own feelings are coming from a very different point of view. Again, like I said, that doesn't mean the coding and marking business is bad. It's a good business. Yeah, I could be comfortable with being. I'm not saying this is a threat. Like I said, no, I think whether people look at AI as a threat or, I'm not getting into that part. We're not getting away from coding and marking because we feel it's under threat. I don't think the government is going to change legislation anytime soon, from my feeling.
It's just my own feeling, opinion, that I don't think legislation is going to change fundamentally to sort of make the batch and all that type of information, MRP information non-mandatory. It could happen, I'm not denying that. As long as that happens, it will be required. The same thing for the pipes and the cable, the pressure ratings, the information. We're printing a lot of basic stuff out here, I'm not seeing this legislation changing, at least in the next few years. Of course, I'm not in the government, I can't say anything. I don't know how they evaluate what needs to be done or not to be done. It's not a threat aspect. The focus is more that we have that capability. We have sort of completed our coding and marking product portfolio quite substantially.
With the Markprint acquisition, we've improved our own digital printing skills. That opens up a new avenue for us, which is a combination of digital printing, coding and marking, part of our track and trace offering also. That's a big area we've opened up. It's a sort of hybrid area. We've got into the track and trace area. We've been investing that in the last four or five years now, and that's somewhat at a certain level, although still needs more focus, more investments to continue developing that tool, so that it truly is a strong product. Just to give you a larger picture on what's happening, because coding and marking is not bad, and I think that it's going to be the strong ways which is going to give us that space that we can create other platforms.
I don't think that's going to change. Neither is it a bad business to be in, but neither is it like, no. Yeah, if I want to be different level of business, if I want to be different level of IP or a different level platform, then we have to actively target these opportunities that we've undertaken right now. Like I said, I'm focused on making the majority of these opportunities before obviously, we even think of doing anything else. Give that assurance too. I've already got that. First we will mature these before we even think of something else. Once they're profitable, then only we'll think of something else going forward.
No, noted. Shiva. Actually, as investors, we are encouraged that you're exploring these new areas. The objective of asking the question was that, are we like the Infosys and TCSs of 2010, or are we on the 2020 phase where we have to spend on this today, otherwise the overall consolidated growth is under pressure? I think you answered the question. I was trying to understand from that perspective. Yeah, all the best to you on these new ventures, and hopefully we start seeing them bearing some fruit soon. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Shiva, you had to address those two questions at the end, right?
Yeah. Saket was going to If you can just put those questions again, Saket. Just one question at a time. Let's break it down.
One at a time.
Yeah. What is the UNNATI question? The investment in the Guwahati facility, is that correct, Saket? Yeah.
Saket, these are new to you.
Okay. I believe the first question was the investment in the new factory in the northeast. like I said, one of the bigger longer-term issues.
Yes
The bigger longer-term issues with our current setup of the packaging business is the cost of the packaging material. I agree that some questions were asked, and I did say yes, there's some slight issues with the machine finalization as of right now. But one of the other big challenges in the long term, especially with the large customers, is the cost of the material. Still very approximately costs like two something INR a pack for the cost of the packaging material. It's increased a bit after this Iran thing. We're importing it all. It's going to cost about one and a half INR. When we make it in Guwahati, we believe we can sell it to the customer for almost 40% less.
What is two and a half now will be one and a half then, or what was INR 1 now it could be about INR 1.25-INR 1.30. We believe that's going to actually make a much bigger explosion in the market. A regular sachet was about INR 0.40 for a bulk customer like Unilever, who makes Dove or something like that, Sunsilk, or one of those types of things in bulk. We will be about INR 1.20-INR 1.30 on that type of large-scale customer. Again, it's never going to make us more than INR 2 packet or even maybe up to the INR 5, but we'll be very competitive in a INR 8-INR 10 packet. The other part that we think is that in the foreign markets, EUR 0.01 or whatever is really not a big deal for them.
Even for a ketchup and sort of cheaper products, I don't think for them, it's going to be a different type of situation. We needed to invest in the materials, and of course, that's also part of our business model. It's a little bit, we're selling the machine, of course, the packaging machine. In fact, out there, the materials business will give us, when you look at the value of how much margin we're making on the machine versus how much we're making on the material in year one, obviously, the machine is the main business.
When you look at the fact that we're going to make money on this machine for the, it's got a 15 year life, and even if it runs 10, 12 years on average, so 15, 20, you're going to make money on this machine, a little more money on this machine, for 10, 12 years. The value of the materials is significantly higher than that of the machine. The machine, it's like a jet engine or something. You sell the engine, but the money is as much in the parts and the upgrades and the services and here it's the same thing as like a jet windows or stock. Definitely, there's a value in selling the machine and margin that we're making in it right now, but we're going to make more money in the materials down the line.
By making the materials cheaper, we believe that the margin, the volume of the business is going to increase exponentially. As a result, the scope of how much we can service the V-Shapes business is going to increase exponentially. That's the primary purpose of putting up this [solodi] factory. We are putting some pouring and locking bits out there. This is to accelerate the revenue right in the beginning. It's not that our Guwahati facility is mostly running out of capacity. We could have done these minor expansions in Guwahati. We're doing them instead of the new facilities so that we maximize the incentives on offer. Does this cover the Ulundi question for everyone? The Northeast expansion? I think that's that question.
Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes. That was the reason. If you could just also give color on the incentive part and also, on an annual basis or by what optimum level of revenue we will be enjoying the benefits. If some color on the incentive also would have sufficed, or I'll take it offline later.
The benefits are, you get INR 7.5 crores back on a INR 15 crore investment plant and machinery. If you go beyond INR 15 crores, you still get only INR 7.5 crores back, it is capped at that. The second benefit is that you get a 5% interest subsidy on your term loan.
Yeah
for a period of
Six years.
Six years.
Yeah.
The third benefit is that equivalent to the plant and machinery investment, you get a excise, or rather a GST refund of the same, over 10 years. Suppose, just to give you an idea, if I invest INR 50 crores in plant and machinery, I'll get back INR 5 crores of GST refund a year every year for 10 years. Obviously, in present value terms, that's less than INR 50 crores, there is a benefit to that. We are already in Guwahati. We probably wouldn't have gone for this scheme if we weren't already there, it's not far from my existing plot. We've had a lot of experience working in the Northeast, we didn't feel any risk in going to that area.
The logistics costs are quite well covered because there are some separate, minor subsidies on that, getting the freight from somewhere in the Northeast to, I think Siliguri or Bangalore or someplace like that. It's not really a concern. There are some reasonably significant benefits. They're not huge, but they add up and made our case for sticking to Guwahati for our expansion worldwide, rather than doing something right outside Bombay or Delhi or somewhere like that. That was the option.
Okay, we'll close it here now. Thank you to all the participants for joining on the call. Thank you to the management team for giving us their time. This brings us to the end of today's conference call. Thank you.