Discussing the Impacts of COVID on the Printing and Packaging Sector with Hasit Patel of RAMCO Group

Hasit Patel, COO at RAMCO Group, talks about the impacts of COVID on the printing and packaging side of the business.

“Because of COVID, the packaging side actually started growing with the consumption of food and loads of manufacturing going up. The printing side took a big hit, with schools being down and generally businesses not wishing to invest on print related matters. We are now looking at centralizing some of our functions like sales and things like that, and just making sure that rather than looking at our competitors and seeing that we are competing with people with low overheads, we are asking what, as a group of companies, we can put into our portfolio or management that would set us apart so that family businesses like mom and pop shops cannot compete with us. Examples of that are better use of technology. Our e-commerce site has gone live. For the first time, we are trying to cater to niche markets like the cottage industry, home cooking, home baking, and those kind of businesses that have really taken off. But they struggle to get printing and packaging, so we have developed a quick set of products for them. We have been able to market that on a good e-commerce platform, which is going live as we speak. But really, it is about refocusing on who the real clients are and how they are changing in the way that they are consuming the packaging. The standard stuff has remained pretty much the same. We looked at manufacturing and all of that. But then we started looking at what other markets have been created as a result of the situation, and we started addressing those pretty well”, says Hasit Patel.

ABOUT RAMCO GROUP: Ramco Group is a conglomerate of over 50 companies operating within East Africa with a focus on 6 sectors: print, hardware, manufacturing, office supplies, services and property. The Group started from humble beginnings as a hardware store in Nairobi (Kenya) in 1948 and has since expanded into Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, and now employs over 4,000 people with an annual turnover in excess of US$300 million.

For more information, please visit: www.ramco-group.com.

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