Taking the pain out of designing, buying and distributing packaging materials

Rahul Garg founded Moglix in 2015 to bring ease, speed, convenience and services to the b2b industrial segments. The Noida-based organization is a b2b eCommerce startup for providing services for procurement of industrial products such as MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations). Backed by equity investors such as Ratan Tata, Tiger Global, IFC, Sequoia, and Accel. The company has raised US$ 470 million (approximately Rs 3,562 crore) and became a ‘unicorn’ in 2020. With more than 1,000 employees, the company claims its current valuation is US$ 2.6 billion (approximately Rs 19,577 crore). Although Moglix began as an industrial product material procurement and MRO company, in 2019 it diversified to the packaging materials vertical.

As a contract aggregator and supplier of packaging materials since 2019, the company works for brands such as Lenskart, Comesum, Zomato, Swiggy, Rebel Foods, and several others. In packaging supply chain procurement its profitability comes from its expertise in leveraging its volume purchasing with the use of digitalization, vendor consolidation, product and pricing uniformity, benchmarking, and new product development.

The company brokers and consolidates almost every type of packaging used in segments such as food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, automotive, eCommerce, electronics, home furnishing and textile, logistics and personal care. It offers primary, secondary and tertiary packaging made of all materials – paper, plastics and films, metal or glass. Packaging types and formats include food trays, pet bottles and jars, laminates, sachets, pouches, kraft sealable bags, lamitubes, VCI bags, labels and stickers, blister, thermoform trays, glass bottles, shrink sleeves, corrugated sheets and boxes, monocartons, polybags, stretch films, paper bags, plastic crates, pp fluted boxes, seals, barcodes and bopp tapes.

Moglix’s onsite delivery of sustainable SKUs such as paper bags, compostable bags, molded trays, bagasse trays, cotton carry bags, and bespoke biodegradable packaging are provided to more than 25,000 pin codes. The company inventory management stretches across its 35 warehouses across the country.

Food and beverages, eCommerce, ePharma, and logistics are the company’s main customers and it claims that its packaging materials fulfil more than 70% of the eCommerce industry’s packaging demands. It provides big manufacturers across sectors with source-to-site packaging supply chain solutions. For perishables’ and short shelf life products it is able to prevent pilferage, spoilage, and wear and tear across domestic and international trade transit routes.

With new product development and design, Moglix offers brand owners optimized sustainability solutions including sustainable packaging. The company says the critical lever is not only to identify sustainable materials but to develop a robust supply chain that can provide packaging components made from sustainable materials at the right cost and quality. This saves raw material and improves aesthetics while keeping the circular economy in mind.

The company’s USP is its ability to provide complete packaging and supply chain solutions in one place. The client does not need to go to another platform to find the component. Customers are provided with access to a buyer portal where they can track their current order along with re-ordering.

Shobhit Goel, senior vice-president of Packaging and CapEx at Moglix, sees a bright future in aggregation, “The Indian packaging industry will see a paradigm shift towards an organized aggregator business model, which will act as a tailwind for the industry and drive the next wave of operational efficiency.”

The company’s business seems scalable as Goel adds, “We operate as an entire ecosystem of packaging supplies right from raw material to the finished product. We have recently kicked off operations in the UAE and are planning to tap the global market.”

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.

The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.

Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.

As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.

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