To begin with, the company will set up a Rs 2-crore plant to produce inks for its coders and set up a larger facility to produce industrial marking machines by December, according to company general manager KVA Naidu. The first batch of knocked-down kits would arrive by the third quarter of 1999.

India is the fourth country where Imaje will have a production facility after the US, China and France. However, the investment in the plant would be funded through internal accruals by the company. The company had received FIPB permission to invest Rs 5 crore in the 100 per cent owned Indian subsidiary in 1997.

According to Naidu, the company has already turned profitable. Its turnover at the end of the first fiscal year ended December 1998 was close to Rs 14 crore. Hence, funding the expansion will not require further investment by theparent company.

Imaje India, which claims second position in the industrial marking market with a 35 per cent share of Rs 50 crore market, is the only top manufacturer of inkjet printers and other coding and marking machines to have set up a wholly owned subsidiary in India.

The over Franc 1 billion Imaje SA is part of the US-based Fortune 500 company Dover Technologies, which has holding in 50 capital goods companies worldwide.

The company last week bagged a Rs 65 lakh order for supply of 30 Imaje Large Character (ILC) industrial bar coding printers from Castrol India. These printers will be used for printing on card boxes containing lubricant oil and will be used at various Castrol locations including Patalganga, Silvassa, Ballabgarh, Calcutta and Chennai.

``Castrol introduced the concept of online coding with inkjet printers to improve quality and have a control over the inventory of containers in 1995. The company initially used other inkjet printers as well as Imaje printers, but found ourprinters to be better in terms of operating costs, reliability, printer downtime and inventory of consumables and spares and has stuck to Imaje since then,'' said Naidu.

Imaje's other clients in India include Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Haldiram, Pepsi, SmithKline Beecham, Nestle and Hindustan Lever. Its inkjet printers and marking machines find applications in consumer products, including pharmaceutical products where codings have to be marked. Imaje sells about 150 machines a year in India and plans to double it by the end of 1999.

Imaje India also plans to set up its branch offices and engineering support centres in more locations in addition to existing ones at Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad.