Proud to be one of the country’s largest printing companies

By Anaseini Dimate, The Fiji Times – 15 March 2025

TURNING 40, later this month, Star Print­ery is proud to be one of Fiji’s largest print­ing com­pan­ies. It stands out as the only com­pany in the region offer­ing loc­ally prin­ted and man­u­fac­tured goods under one roof.

This unique cap­ab­il­ity allows them to provide a wide vari­ety of high-qual­ity prin­ted mater­i­als to meet diverse cus­tomer needs.

With dec­ades of exper­i­ence, Star Print­ery con­tin­ues to be a lead­ing player in the Fijian print­ing industry, com­bin­ing tra­di­tion with innov­a­tion to serve its cli­en­tele.

The com­pany’s dir­ector Vikesh Chauhan said this year’s 40th Anniversary is quite a sig­ni­fic­ant achieve­ment for them — being a fam­ily-owned busi­ness.

“We star­ted small and grew to what we are today purely because of the hard work, ded­ic­a­tion and vis­ion of our par­ents,” he said.

“We don’t have to rely on imports from other coun­tries when we can pro­duce the same product in bet­ter qual­ity in our home­land.”

The com­pany has a wide range of products like busi­ness cards, labels, posters, magazines, book­lets, exer­cise books, envel­opes, pack­aging mater­i­als and paper made takeaway boxes, bowls, cups and plates.

Mr Chauhan said Star Print­ery is pas­sion­ate about the Fijian-made cam­paign mainly because they’re pas­sion­ate Fiji­ans, who love our coun­try and by sup­port­ing Fijian-made products means they’re able to keep Fiji’s eco­nomy healthy and at the same time keep their staff mem­bers employed.

He says they chose paper because it is the only sub­sti­tute to styro­foam and plastic that is 100 per cent recyc­lable and com­pletely bio­de­grad­able.

“Paper is recyc­lable and it is not toxic and harm­ful to our envir­on­ment com­pared to Styro­foam and plastic.”

“Unfor­tu­nately, after Styro­foam was banned, we saw an increase in the usage of plastic made items like plastic cups, bowls and takeaway con­tain­ers. This defeated the pur­pose of us pro­mot­ing ideas in try­ing to save our ocean and envir­on­ment.”

“We are hop­ing our cit­izens under­stand the bene­fits of using paper made products as com­pared to the use of plastics.”

Mr Chauhan said by using paper made products, con­sumers are con­sciously mak­ing an act­ive decision to pro­tect our planet.

“For the Fijian-made cam­paign to be sus­tain­able, the gov­ern­ment also needs to ensure that local man­u­fac­tur­ers are incentiv­ised and pro­tec­ted by ensur­ing impor­ted products attract a sig­ni­fic­ant per­cent­age of duty espe­cially if the same products can be man­u­fac­tured in Fiji.”

Mr Chauhan stresses that this then makes it viable for them to con­tinue to invest in their busi­nesses as they can­not con­tinue to con­trib­ute towards a Fijian-made eco­nomy without adequate gov­ern­ment sup­port.