Ghana Printing and Packaging Industry: uniPrecision Printing and Packaging Company

Interview with Dean Du Toit, CEO of uniPrecision Printing and Packaging Company Ltd

What is your assessment of the sector? What are the latest trends? Is the market competitive in West Africa and globally?

Firstly, the sector is very competitive. It is fast growing and consumer driven. A lot of the food and beverage companies are increasing their capacity, not only in Ghana, but across all of West Africa. Many of the imports originally come from countries such as India and the Middle East. For us, the challenge is raw materials. Nothing is made in Ghana so everything is brought in from abroad which also carries a cost when you import. That is our number one challenge to being competitive. Also, labor is an issue. When you have to look at expatriates, there is a cost associated with that. Ideally, one wants to try to recruit local employees to run these machines, but that can be challenging in itself as well. So, one needs to invest in training and development, which is ideally what you should be doing to reduce your production costs. Across the region, quality and consistency of quality is a big issue. This is what has driven the large food and beverage companies, particularly the multinationals, to go abroad for their finished products. There has never been consistency in this part of the world. What uniPrecision brings to this part of the region is a solution to quality and a solution to timely service delivery. This is where we have focused and this is what has made us successful in securing a premium base portfolio of clients.

The competition here is quite big. What makes you different from what others are offering?

We understand that the cost associated with buying machinery from Europe is more expensive than from China or India, but we have to look at the long-term plan as opposed to the short term. Inevitably, the machinery from Europe will withstand the test over 20 to 15 years as opposed to machinery bought from elsewhere.

We are just over three years old, from the time we broke ground to the time we started operations. What makes us different is our focus on quality, which is one of the main challenges in this part of the world and West Africa in particular. We focused on providing quality to our customers by ensuring that we have the right resources from a human capital perspective and also from an equipment perspective to make that happen. The human capital aspect is critical. The type of machinery we have is very advanced technology. We have very good structures in place to ensure that our prequalification criteria for raw materials supplies is at world standard. We also have made some significant changes to how packaging is done for some of the companies. For example, we have changed Unilever’s product range of Lifebuoy, Lux, Sunlight, Key Brilliant, Geisha, which are some of their top brands that were originally printed in gravure printing and are now being printed in flexo. Gravure printing is a very old process which primarily was used for jobs with high volumes because they manufactured the cylinders to be engraved and chromed so they could withstand very long runs. There was no other solution or option for printing. Flexo has been developed now and it is catching up. If you have the right technical resources and human capital, you can achieve the same output in quality as you can with gravure. It is achievable and we have proven that by changing the entire range of premium soap products for Unilever from gravure to flexo. This is the first of its kind in the world. It is very interesting and it was a challenge. At the time when we brought Unilever onboard, they supported us in making this change. What does the change mean? It brings a reduced cost for our customer, a keener process which gives you more green initiatives, and the turnaround is very quick. We can produce some of the products within 48 hours. There are a lot of benefits from the customer’s perspective and for us as a company we believe that the green initiative part of it plays a big role. In terms of our achievements and what makes us different, we offer our clients choices in solutions. We do not just give them one solution. We can offer them numerous solutions to the problems that they have.

What do you look for when sourcing your machines to keep up the quality?

I am a firm believer in purchasing machinery that can produce the desired results that you need in terms of performance and in terms of the quality aspect. At the same time, you also need to have the right people to be able to operate those machines and to give you that result. I do not favor buying machines from companies who have not got a long reputation in providing state of the art technology and automation and in performance of machinery. Predominantly, we would support countries from Europe when sourcing machinery. We understand that the cost associated with buying machinery from Europe is more expensive than from China or India, but we have to look at the long-term plan as opposed to the short term. Inevitably, the machinery from Europe will withstand the test over 20 to 15 years as opposed to machinery bought from elsewhere. In my experience in the industry, that has been the solution to achieving our objectives in terms of quality, performance, and automation when it comes to production.

How do you acquire clients? Is it difficult when you have just started in this industry? What has the process been?

We started engaging with clients while we were nearing the end of the project. In parallel with building and finishing, we engaged with the clients that we were targeting, mainly the large multinationals based in Ghana and the large locally, privately owned food and beverage companies. How we did this was quite simple. We demonstrated to them what we were building, when it would be finished, what we planned to offer, how we were going to do it, and the level of quality, human capital, and resources that we would have within the company. We also explained our CSR and green initiatives. We were not just painting a rosy picture, but stating facts, and we achieved those points. By doing so, those companies that we engaged with audited uniPrecision to identify if what we had said was really the case. The next step was to produce the sample reels to test the quality of our production. That has been a great success with all the companies we have dealt with. We have proven that we can walk the talk.

What are your CSR responsibilities? What do you do for the environment?

For the environment, we have invested in the recycling of plastics. I look at it as an initiative that contributes to reducing our environmental footprint but one that also demonstrates to other manufacturers that it can be done. It is not something that is difficult to do, it simply needs a bit of initiative and push and a bit of investment. The long-term returns are good for the environment and the company. Obviously, you can get your return on investment over a period of time. It is not a wasted investment. All of our plastics are recycled onsite here at uniPrecision. Nothing goes to the landfill site. We then sell the finished product of recycling, which is basically resins that you would use in extrusion or injection molding, to local companies who then manufacture plastic products for household goods and industry. That is part of our green initiatives that uniPrecision contributes to. We also believe in creating employment for local people. When we bought this project, we invited 35 qualified local graduates in the electrical and mechanical fields for an induction program of six days where we gave them a thorough overview of the company and career choices that they could make in different divisions. After the six-day induction, we gave them a week to decide and all 35 came back and had signed up within two or three days. But we had all these employees who had absolutely no idea of the level of detail or technical skills that they would require in order to develop. So, we invested in an instructor from South Africa whose sole purpose was to train and develop our local employees through a modular based training development program. It was a sort of unofficial apprenticeship for our local employees. It has done so well that we actually have some local employees operating machines at the moment. It will take time, but we will achieve our objective of getting 80% localized workforce in uniPrecision.

Project yourself into the medium term, two to three years’ time. What do you want to have achieved by that time? What is your vision?

Our vision is to achieve our long-term objectives that we have set as uniPrecision. These include reaching our maximum capacity in terms of utilization, achieving 80% local workforce, and at the same time being able to contribute to the industry as a whole in terms of green initiatives with plastics and recycling. Education at a lower level in schools is also an area where we can contribute. That is where we need to start in order to reduce the plastics pollution problem that we encounter not only in West Africa but across the world. We also want to look at growth across the region which we are slowly starting to encounter. We are taking it in baby steps in terms of growth and making sure all of our structures are in place before we start venturing out into neighboring countries. That is our next two or three years across West Africa. I do not have a crystal ball though, so we will have to wait and see how it turns out.

If you plan to move outside of Ghana, would you be interested in partnering with other companies or financial institutions?

We will see by the size of the growth. It is a bit early to look at that right now. We would look at all the options that are available to us to see how we can develop further growth outside of Ghana, what financial resources we would need, what type of partners we would need, if any. But that is something where we will cross that bridge when we get to it.

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