Control Print Ltd Management Discussions

The industrial sector achieved a growth rate of 8.1% in the first half of 2025-26. Indias manufacturing PMI reached a four-month high of 56.9 in February 2025-26, driven by strong domestic orders and efficiency improvements.

Investor sentiment remained optimistic, with the Nifty India Manufacturing Index reached a 52-week high of 16,152.65 points in early May 2026.

Outlook

As India enters 2026-27, economic prospects remain strong, tempered by shifting global trade dynamics and energy price volatility arising from the West Asia conflict. GDP growth is forecast at 6.6% to 6.9% for 2026-27. The focus domestically is on sustaining the 8.1% industrial growth momentum seen in the first half of 2025-26. The Union Budget 2026-27 significantly increased allocations for rural roads, housing, and infrastructure, expected to sustain consumer spending across income levels. GST 2.0, effective 22nd September, 2025, simplified the multi-slab structure to a two-rate framework of 5% for essentials and 18% for standard goods, reducing compliance costs for manufacturers and improving affordability across FMCG, healthcare, and consumer goods categories.

Coding and Marking Solutions Global Industry Overview

The global coding and marking solutions market is estimated at US$ 9.14 Billion in CY 2026 and is projected to reach US$ 12.31 Billion by CY 2031 (CAGR: 6.14%). These systems have transitioned from simple compliance tools to critical enablers of supply chain transparency, with anti-counterfeiting applications accounting for over 28.7% of market share in CY 2025.

Indian Industry Overview

Indias coding and marking sector is projected to expand at a CAGR of 8.9% through CY 2030, reaching nearly US$ 0.64 Billion. Growth is supported by Indias emergence as a preferred manufacturing destination and stricter product identification norms across food, healthcare, and electronics.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Urban (PMAY-U)

The PMAY-U 2.0 initiative, launched on 1st September, 2024, continues to scale with a focus on providing affordable housing to 1 Crore additional urban families over a five-year period. The Union Budget 2026-27 increased the allocation for PMAY-Urban to Rs. 22,025 Crores, a 179% rise from the previous years revised estimates. As of early 2026, over 122 Lakh houses have been sanctioned under both phases, with nearly 96 Lakh units already delivered. This scale of residential construction drives sustained demand for coding solutions across pipes, electrical cables, and building material components, where traceability and quality verification are essential at every stage of the supply chain.

National Pharmaceutical Policy

The pharmaceutical sector is advancing towards digital biology and AI-driven drug discovery. The Government introduced the Biopharma SHAKTI initiative in the Union Budget 2026-27, with a dedicated outlay of Rs. 10,000 Crores to strengthen the biologics and biosimilars ecosystem. PLI schemes for bulk drugs attracted investments exceeding Rs. 4,800 Crores in greenfield projects as of late 2025. These policies aim to transform India from the Pharmacy of the World to an Innovator for the World, requiring high-speed, secure coding solutions for serialisation, anti-counterfeiting, and real-time traceability in increasingly complex global supply chains.

Urban Infrastructure Development Fund (UIDF)

The UIDF functions as a revolving fund supporting Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities with viable infrastructure projects. Updates from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs in May 2026, prioritise integrated water supply, sewerage, and solid waste management, encouraging urban local bodies to adopt technology- driven governance and urban planning reforms.

As these systems expand across smaller cities, the demand for marked and traceable sanitation infrastructure components increases, with accurate product identification becoming essential for longterm maintenance management and regulatory compliance.

Automotive Mission Plan (AMP) 2047

AMP 2047 is a strategic roadmap aimed at making India a global leader in automotive manufacturing and trade by 2047, with developmental targets for 2030 and 2037 focusing on electric mobility, charging infrastructure, and innovation-driven exports. The Ministry of Heavy Industries is coordinating with industry leaders to integrate Industry 4.0 practices and enhance supply chain resilience. With total domestic vehicle production reaching 31 million units in 2024-25, the demand for precise coding and marking systems is critical for component tracking, safety compliance, and branding across both traditional and electric vehicle segments.

Income Tax Rationalisation and GST 2.0

The Union Budget 2026-27 retained the revised tax regime as the default option, with complete tax exemption for individuals earning up to Rs. 12 Lakhs through enhanced rebates and a standard deduction of Rs. 75,000 maintained for salaried individuals.

These measures are designed to improve disposable income and stimulate consumer spending across FMCG, electronics, and home improvement sectors, fueling demand for efficient packaging and product identification solutions at higher market volumes.

GST 2.0, effective 22nd September, 2025 simplified the multi-slab structure to a two-rate framework: 5% for essentials and 18% for standard goods, with 40% applicable to sin and luxury goods. This abolished the 12% and 28% slabs for most items, corrected duty inversions in labour-intensive sectors, and lowered costs for consumer goods, vehicles, healthcare, and agricultural inputs. For manufacturers, the rationalisation reduced compliance complexity and improved cost competitiveness across packagingintensive sectors, directly supporting the demand environment for coding and marking solutions.

Boost to the Manufacturing Industry

The Union Budget 2026-27 allocated Rs 1.85 Lakh Crores to states as capital expenditure loans. New initiatives, including the Champion SMEs programme and a Rs 10,000 Crores SME Growth Fund aim to strengthen the competitiveness of smaller industrial units. The budget also incentivises the adoption of green manufacturing practices and energy efficiency. The expansion of manufacturing clusters and industrial corridors drives the adoption of high-performance coding technologies that integrate with automated production lines and support sustainable manufacturing goals.

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Make in India 2.0 and the Made in India Brand Scheme

Make in India 2.0 is focussed on increasing the manufacturing sectors contribution to 25% of GDP by the end of 2026. The Made in India Brand Scheme, launched in May 2026, provides a unified quality and trust framework for Indian products, emphasising high-speed intellectual property registration and the establishment of state-of-the-art industrial corridors. This shift from attracting investment to certifying product quality increases the demand for sophisticated marking solutions that verify product origin, ensure global regulatory alignment, and protect brand integrity in international markets.

Pradhan Mantri Kisan SAMPADA Yojana (PMKSY)

PMKSY continues to modernise the agro-processing sector, with a consolidated list of 408 approved cold chain projects as of 31st March, 2026. The scheme provides grants-in-aid for integrated cold chains, value addition infrastructure, and food safety quality assurance. Recent guidelines issued in May 2026, emphasise the creation of multi-product food irradiation units and preservation facilities at the farm level. As food products move through these automated value chains, accurate batch coding, expiry dating, and real-time traceability are essential for compliance and reducing food wastage.

Company Overview

Control Print Limited (also referred to as Control Print, or The Company) was founded in Mumbai in 1991 with one clear mandate: to build Indias own industrial coding and marking capability. 35 years later, the Company stands as the only domestic manufacturer of this scale in the industry, competing alongside multinational players and consistently growing faster than the overall market.

Manufacturing happens at two facilities that the Company built and owns: 1) Approx. 30,000 sq. ft. plant in Nalagarh, Himachal Pradesh, which produces CIJ, Large Character, TTO, and Hot Coder systems and 2) Approx. 70,000 sq. ft. facility in Guwahati, Assam, which handles TIJ and High-Resolution Printer assembly alongside the full ink and solvent manufacturing operation. Between them, they manufacture the complete range that Control Print takes to market.

Product Portfolio

The businesses that rely on this span approximately 17 industry verticals, from FMCG and pharmaceuticals to dairy, wire and cable, and building materials. Each vertical has its own production rhythms, compliance requirements, and coding demands, yet the commercial logic underlying each customer relationship is consistent. A printer placed on a production line stays there for seven- to eight- years on average, and through that period it generates a steady stream of demand for consumables, spares, and services. That stream is what gives the business its financial character: recurring, predictable, and largely insulated from the volatility that affects capital-intensive industries. Sustaining it requires people close to where production happens. Control Prints sales and service professionals work across Indias industrial geography, embedded in the operational realities of their customersRs facilities and available when it matters.

Coding and marking is the foundation, but the Company has strategically built around it. QRiousCodes, Control Prints cloud-based Track and Trace brand, adds a full-stack traceability and anti-counterfeiting layer on top of the core coding infrastructure. V-Shapes, operating through CP Italy S.R.L., takes the Company into single-dose sustainable packaging, a category that draws on the same precision manufacturing discipline applied to its coders. The Mask Lab addresses occupational safety, while the international portfolio spanning the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the UAE extends both the product range and the geographic reach of the Group well beyond Indian borders.

Subsidiaries

Control Print operates through seven subsidiaries across five countries, each serving a defined role within the Groups growth strategy across coding and marking, track and trace, and packaging.

For a detailed overview of subsidiary operations, refer to pages 24-25 of this Annual Report.

Operational Review

2025-26 carried the standalone business to its highest-ever annual revenue, and the story behind that number is familiar: a growing installed base generating consistent demand for consumables, spares, and services. Consumables contributed ~61% of coding and marking revenue through the year, a proportion that reflects how deeply the product is embedded in customersRs production infrastructure. Printer additions tracked ahead of the prior year, widening the base from which future consumable revenues will compound, and a price revision announced in the second half of 2025-26 is expected to strengthen realisations going into 2026-27.

Across verticals, pipes, food, dairy, cable and wire, steel and metal, and healthcare were the strongest for market share consolidation. Sugar, cement, and plywood sustained healthy traction, rounding out a year where growth was broad-based rather than concentrated in a single sector

Beyond the core business, the Track and Trace segment under QRiousCodes recorded its first commercially meaningful year New solutions were implemented and a pipeline is developing steadily across pharmaceutical and FMCG customers, supported by a regulatory environment that is increasingly working in the Companys favour The Governments mandate for serialisation of the top 300 (to be confirmed) pharmaceutical drugs creates a demand runway that extends well beyond 2025-26, and the Company is building its platform and service capability ahead of that curve.

Internationally, Markprint BV and Codeology Group Ltd are both operationally profitable, and the Company increased its stake in Markprint BV to 90% during the year, a decision that reflects the quality of that business. CP Italy S.R.L., housing the V-Shapes packaging operation, is in a product refinement and ramp-up phase, with management targeting breakeven in 2026-27 Control Print MEA FZE initiated its first commercial engagements in the UAE, opening a new geography for both the Indian standalone business and the European subsidiaries.

Product Division Highlights

Every production line has a coding requirement. What differs from one facility to the next is the substrate, the speed, the regulatory standard, and the environment the system must work in. Control Prints hardware portfolio is built to serve that full range, backed by consumables manufactured in-house and a service network that keeps production running once the printer is placed.

Continuous Inkjet (CIJ)

Continuous Inkjet remains the largest hardware revenue contributor in the portfolio, a position it holds because of versatility rather than incumbency. Glass, flexible films, cables, pipes, and irregular surfaces all fall within its operating range, making it the natural choice across the widest cross-section of Indian industry. The current generation is built around lower fluid consumption and higher machine uptime, responding directly to what production managers measure. Demand from the wire and cable sector was particularly strong in 2025-26 as manufacturers upgraded to high-contrast pigmented inks to improve legibility on dark substrates.

Thermal Inkjet (TIJ) and High-Resolution Printing

Where CIJ serves speed and substrate diversity, Thermal Inkjet serves precision. Adoption has accelerated in pharmaceutical and FMCG environments as these industries migrate towards 2D Data Matrix and QR codes for serialisation and traceability. Control Print positions its TIJ range as a zero-maintenance solution for clean-room and regulated production settings, a distinction that carries real weight for customers where contamination risk is managed at the regulatory level. Printhead technology developed through Markprint BV strengthens the Companys offering in this segment with a product quality advantage that domestically focused competitors cannot easily replicate.

Laser Coding

Laser Coding addresses a different kind of requirement. As sustainability commitments harden from aspiration to contract for large manufacturers, solvent-free permanent marking has shifted from a premium option to an operational preference. The Laser division is growing in response, with the strongest demand in high-end beverage bottling and pharmaceutical blister packaging, where tamper-proof marking carries both brand protection and regulatory consequence.

Thermal Transfer Overprinting (TTO) and Large Character Printing

Thermal Transfer Overprinting and Large Character Printing serve the packaging end of the production line. TTO tracks the growing flexible film and pouch segment, moving in step with packaged food and dairy expansion, while Large Character Printers handle outer carton and secondary packaging identification. Both product lines saw improved penetration of multi-machine accounts during the year as customers standardised their coding infrastructure across production lines.

Consumables

Underpinning all of this is a consumables range manufactured in-house and chemically engineered to work with Control Prints own hardware. This is a deliberate architecture: it sustains high gross margins on the consumables line, gives the Company control over product performance, and eliminates the compatibility uncertainty that comes with third-party supplies. In 2025-26, Control Print introduced eco-friendly, low-VOC ink formulations across several product grades, addressing both the internal sustainability mandates that large corporate customers now carry contractually and the broader regulatory direction on volatile organic compound emissions in industrial settings.

Service Infrastructure

The service network that supports this hardware is itself a competitive asset. With 450+ field engineers maintaining response times under 24 hours across most major industrial clusters, Control Prints field capability is a direct input to customer satisfaction and retention. In 2025-26, the Company extended this reach further into Tier-2 and Tier-3 industrial geographies, decentralising its service hubs as manufacturing activity moves deeper into India.

That proximity matters beyond maintenance. Control Prints engineers are the Companys most effective channel for understanding evolving customer requirements, introducing new products, and supporting customers through infrastructure transitions. GS1 Sunrise 2027, the global mandate requiring QR-code-based product identification on all consumer goods packaging, is the most significant such transition currently in motion, and Control Prints engineers are already in those conversations with customers, well ahead of the deadline.

Strategic Expansion and Digital Integration

The acquisitions of Markprint BV and Codeology Group Ltd have delivered beyond their original thesis. Both subsidiaries are operationally profitable and are now opening new revenue lines in the Indian market, bringing high-speed digital printing and label print-and-apply capabilities that were previously outside Control Prints domestic offer Early orders have been secured and the pipeline is building. Control Print MEA FZE extends this reach into the Gulf, providing a channel for both the Indian standalone business and the European subsidiaries from a single regional presence.

QRiousCodes operates as a full-stack Track and Trace solution: hardware, consumables, cloud-integrated software, and analytics delivered together Its architecture uses DLT and blockchain-based unique identifiers that cannot be duplicated, offering genuine anti-counterfeiting protection rather than compliance-only coding. Pilot projects are underway with large pharmaceutical companies, and as the Governments drug serialisation mandate expands and other regulated sectors follow, QRiousCodes is the Companys longest-horizon growth platform.

Strengths

Indias only domestic manufacturer of coding and marking solutions at this scale, in a market where the other dominant players are multinationals

Integrated model across hardware, proprietary consumables, and nationwide service, creating switching costs that sustain long-term customer relationships

Installed base of 22,000+ printers generating predictable recurring revenue across a 7 to 8 year lifespan per unit

Zero long-term debt on the standalone balance sheet, with ICRA A+ (Stable) and ICRA A1+ credit ratings reaffirmed in March 2026

Consistent annual operating cash flows and strong EBITDA-to-cash conversion, supporting reinvestment without external capital dependency

Two in-house manufacturing facilities and proprietary consumables production, giving the Company supply chain control that distribution-led competitors cannot match

Weaknesses

Global advancement in digital printing, software-driven traceability, and production automation requires continuous capital and R&D investment to stay competitive

Managing service quality and technical talent across a growing, geographically dispersed installed base is a permanent operational demand

The Italian packaging business is in a ramp-up phase, creating a near-term drag on consolidated margins

Consolidated performance will remain divergent from standalone results until international subsidiaries reach operating scale

Opportunities

Pharmaceutical serialisation mandates and GS1 Sunrise 2027 are converting potential customers into active ones, creating compliance-driven demand across categories

Expanded food labelling standards and growing supply chain traceability obligations are widening the addressable market organically

Indias deepening industrial geography, with manufacturing extending into smaller cities and towns, expands the opportunity for hardware placements and long-term service contracts

The Middle East and European subsidiaries offer multi-year revenue potential that operates independently of domestic economic conditions

The coding and marking market in India is expected to grow at 1.5x GDP, providing a structural tailwind for the core business

Threats

Global competitors carry substantially larger R&D budgets, and sustained technological advancement could shorten product lifecycles without proportionate investment from the Company

Currency volatility affects imported component costs and the financial performance of overseas subsidiaries

A broad-based slowdown in Indian manufacturing would compress new printer placements in the near term

Regulatory changes in product labelling or compliance standards could require additional product development and operational investment at short notice

Supply chain disruptions in specialised components, particularly printhead technology and electronic subassemblies, could affect production continuity

Financial Overview

Control Prints financial profile carries three consistent characteristics across cycles: strong operating margins, a debt-free standalone balance sheet, and reliable cash generation. The tables below present key metrics for 2025-26 alongside 2024-25 comparatives.