Midsized commercial sheetfed operations are experiencing some of the washback of business they anticipated when Australasian giant Geon closed last year, but to listen to some punters, it is still quiet in the industry.
And there’s the old nervousness about over-investing in the kit, then struggling to fill capacity to pay it off, and falling into the riptide of competing on price, which the analysts warn about.
But offset still accounts for 95 percent of print volumes – and the experts say smart thinking, innovation and flexibility are far more beneficial to the bottom line than a bottoming price. The more visionary sheetfed houses are positioning themselves high up on the value chain as dynamic partners of advertising agencies and their clients. Hub printing is another way printers can gain new ideas and cut overheads.
[Related: More offset news]
Trade print operation CMYKhub recently acquired a Komori G840P, an eight-colour H-UV perfector press, and has placed a deposit on a Landa Nanographic machine. It is quite an investment in technology, coming on top of an earlier Ryobi UV A1 five-colour plus coater combination for spot-UV.
CMYKhub founder Clive Denholm says: “Larger players in the industry both in commercial and packaging printing continue to update to faster equipment that produces less waste. As the industry consolidates having lowest cost for manufacturing is vital for survival. As far as CMYKhub is concerned, we take the same approach but we do so on behalf of our reseller network, so when we buy the latest technology, our resellers can take advantage of the equipment.”
The company uses a mixture of digital and offset equipment, depending of the product required. Says Denholm: “The hub model allows you to gain a high utilisation but with low margin, a trade-only model requires efficient equipment and systems.”
Rayne Simpson, A/NZ general manager of Komori supplier Ferrostaal, sees a silver lining at the end of the current low-margin gloom. He says, “On the positive side, businesses are looking for a point of difference and offering print buyers new and exciting go-to market strategies. Komori Corporation is at the leading edge of manufacturing sheetfed and web offset technology to enable our industry to compete in an environment challenged from more than one electronic medium.”
Simpson says several large Komori investments in recent months have brightened the outlook. “Komori’s innovation, be it smarts in efficiency gains, low waste or an opportunity to produce and offer print, which were not possible in the past, are now available and operating globally.”
He believes offset manufacturers are meeting the challenge thrown out by A2 inkjet. While volume inkjet has its role, it has helped define and strengthen the value proposition of today’s litho technology.
“There will always be room for both inkjet and offset printing, however, statistics show that over 90 per cent of print on paper is offset and will be so for a very long time,” he says.
Six of the past eight Komori presses sold in Australia have been specified with the H-UV system. These presses print with UV inks, which give the twin benefits of added vibrancy in colour, and instant drying for quick turnaround. The latest is going into Whirlwind Print, its managing director Andrew Cester says, “It will more than double the productivity of our old machine, it halves the waste and the makeready times.”
[Related: More Komori news]
Dave Lewis, KBA Australasia general manager, sheetfed presses, sees press-fleet consolidation as a key to productivity. “One of the main opportunities is the replacement of several older-technology presses with one high-speed, high-tech press, consolidating production and saving costs. Some of the banks like this approach and this can help to justify finance.”
Speed is another factor. He cites the KBA Rapida 106 as an example — with quick makereadies due to automatic job downloads from the job server via QR codes on the printing plates, as well as pre-registering of the job before running stock, coupled with high run-speeds to a maximum 20,000cph.
Nearly all KBA Australasia’s press sales are high-end high-spec presses, says Lewis, although he adds that the vendor is happy to provide printer clients with a basic configuration that meets their requirements.
Lewis identifies rising interest in hybrid lines, in which offset press units support integrated inkjet heads for high-speed VDP and other digital-only services. “KBA can offer this and, in fact, can offer dedicated printing units with special suction impression cylinders to allow for a flat and stable sheet for inkjet imaging from several ink jet heads on this unit.”
Cyber Australia managing director Bernard Cheong sees UV printing as a value-add to keep offset printers competitive, as well as offering chemical embossed printing, matte masking, and printing on foil, plastic and other non-standard substrates. These are areas with less competition, enabling healthier margins, he argues.
Offset continues to occupy a genuine space on the production floor, he says, with LED UV, such as on the Ryobi range, curing on four-colour work, varnish from a fifth unit that renders aqueous coating unnecessary and instant drying. “The cross-over point from digital to LED offset can be as low as 100-200 sheets depending on economies of scale.”
Ryobi also offers presses with a range of inline options including foiling and holograms, all designed to enable printers to create extra margin within the same timeframe and on the same piece of kit. Ryobi also pushes its A1 press, which it says produces an eight-up set as does the B1 press, but for a lower investment cost, as it is a smaller press.
[Related: More Ryobi news]
Sometimes there is a special vertical market out there with your name on it. 5Star Print in Adelaide has used its fleet of Heidelbergs – an XL105 six-colour plus coater, a CD102 two-colour perfector, a five-colour SM52 – as well as a 40in Komori Lithrone – to capture an attractive niche, the boutique end of package printing. It is a lucrative, economy-proof sector that can marshal the resources of printers in the low-to-mid-volume offset space.
Managing director Carolyn Cagney says she saw an opportunity to improve on the common practice of laminating fluted packaging board post-printing. The XL 105 enabled 5Star Print to print directly onto boards of various gauges, creating a selling point over fluted alternatives that need to be laminated. The process is ideal for short runs of luxury items such as wine packs and for pharmaceuticals. She says, “It has enabled us to make inroads into a very tight, closed market space.”
The six-unit XL 105 is not only flexible but fast, argues Cagney. Switching from thin gauge to heavier board is simple and rapid. For example, direct printing onto 1mm substrate has given 5Star Print an edge on its competitors. Another advantage is that printing and finishing can almost all be done under 5Star’s roof – the only exception is gluing.
Shane Hanlon, head of product management and remarketed equipment, Heidelberg A/NZ, believes efficiency and lean manufacturing are the key elements in manufacturing and this is a major focus of Australia’s sheetfed offset leaders. “With all the recent advancements in press technology and workflow, you can’t underestimate the positive effect a re-equipped production process can have on your bottom line.”
He also sees web-to-print as an expanding print market, with many early adopters having experienced considerable growth in both turnover and profits. This has been even more evident in B2B (trade) W2P, with these companies very competitive in the small- to-medium run colour market. “It makes it very difficult for the traditional ‘Mum-and-Dad’-style print shops with older equipment to compete in this area.”
Hanlon views packaging as a market with rising potential for printers, as new technologies and products evolve. “We’ve seen a growth in the associated print requirements in getting these products to customers. Boutique packaging is an area where we see substantial opportunities for sheetfed offset, with the likes of the CD, CX and XL range of presses from Heidelberg. This range has the capability of printing both light and heavy weight substrates with very short makeready times and limited waste.”
Press manufacturers today offer a dizzying range of features than can able a printer to provide their clients with efficiencies and added value solutions.
Colorpak and Hannapak have each recently made multimillion-dollar investments in manroland technology, because the R700 presses come laden with such features.
Hannapak will install Australia’s first R706 LV HS with coater at its plant in Richmond, Sydney. The six-colour press can reach 18,000 sheets per hour and will include "the latest in automation", including InlineSorter, InlineInspector and an auto plate-loading system, according to manroland.
Hannapak managing director Sam Hanna said the press was designed for companies that processed high volumes of cartonboard packaging. "There are a couple of things that take this press to the next level. Apart from the Aupasys [material logistics system] that we tested on the previous machine, it has the latest in-line inspection system," says Hanna.
"We’re not just doing high volumes, we’re doing high volumes of very high-quality work." Hanna said Hannapak also liked the InLine Inspector, which removes the need for check sheets by taking the actual PDF-stepped file from prepress and sending it straight to the press for system checks.
"A lot of bad sheets will [otherwise] have gone through by the time the printer picks up a glitch. With the InLine Inspector, the warning is raised immediately there is a recurring print defect," he said.
Colorpak’s R706 LTTLV double coater press will have a top speed of 17,000 sheets per hour and will include the Aupasys material logistics system, automatic plate loading and an InlineSorter. Managing director Alex Commins said the press would replace two older machines at Colorpak’s supersite in Braeside, Melbourne. "It fits nicely with the rationalisation strategy we’re undergoing at the moment. It’ll give us greater productivity," he said.
"Over many years Colorpak has been at the forefront of technology investment. There are not too many others that can boast the modern suite of equipment that we have. "We have something like 27 presses in the group, and we’ve been consistently buying Roland 700s for six or seven years."
[Related: More Colorpak news]
Manroland Australia managing director Steve Dunwell says: "The people at these top packaging printing companies know what they want in a sheetfed press. They are experienced printers and I believe the decision to go with the latest manroland 700 is a vindication of the high-productivity technology now available for the packaging market."
Hybrid integration with digital printing is an area of focus for press manufacturers, manroland and Oce have a global alliance that sees the German press manufacturer supplying Oce's digital high-speed continuous feed equipment, with manroland feeders.
Steve Dunwell told ProPrint that the deal was ‘a logical partnership’ that was ‘important for the strategic goals of manroland Australasia’.
Dunwell described Oce's digital range as ‘a complementary market to our products’, adding that he expected significant interest from the local market in the combined product offering.
Quality and economies of scale
Offset printing in Australia will survive because technologically it has the quality edge and is still the best bet for long-haul jobs, even with Australia’s shrinking print runs, says Neil Zaltsman, but the business model will need to change drastically.
The operations manager of Crystal Printing Solutions in Perth, hub of the 48-outlet World Wide Online group in Australia, believes shared-resource networks such as WWOL are the future of sheeted offset, especially in compact markets such as Australia.
At Crystal Printing Solutions, a new Heidelberg Speedmaster XL SM75 with Inpress Control, bundled with a Prinect workflow, will be commissioned shortly, eventually replacing a six-colour CD press and sharing the load with an eight-colour Speedmaster.
The new XL press further underwrites Crystal Printing Solutions’ strategy of making every impression count. “The days of pricing your product based on the inefficiencies in your business are gone. You can’t be productively printing 70 per cent of the sheet any longer, it has to be a 100 per cent,” says Zaltsman.
Crystal Printing Solutions gang-prints short B2 runs of its core offerings (calendars, flyers, presentation folders), typically around 2,500 units, to achieve competitive economies of scale, so makeready length is critical. Reducing from 250-500 to 50 sheets, and reducing plate changes from 15 minutes to five, and reducing waste, are the key to productivity, he says. “That value flows through to the client.”
Jobs are typically at 275lpi on 400 and 350gsm board, 150gsm art paper, and 170 and 115gsm stocks. Finishing is limited to one and two-sided matte and one-sided gloss lamination. Pages are impositioned using Metrix, and printed to the ISO 12647 offset standard.
The company’s print manager Oliver Bogden has developed a relationship with a UK print outfit that has an XL and shares its production data with the West Australian company.
Says Zaltsman: “They’re sending us some superb data – number of makereadies, waste sheets, active hours of the presses, and we’re utilising that data to build a picture of what the XL can do for us.
“We’ve been working on continental [12-hour] shifts – a printer would typically work three 12-hour shifts and then have 2-3 days off. Our shift pattern has changed to two 8-hour shifts. Where three operators were traditionally used to run a press, we can comfortably achieve the same output with two operators.”
On the digital side, a Kodak NexPress SX3300 prints short runs and VDP barcoding, and an Oce Ultra 6000 and Konica Minolta C800 print on bond stock. In the bindery, there’s a DTM 8000 A4 mailer-folder from Australian supplier Macro Pro for personalised DM. There’s a Heidelberg Prinect workflow, a Quote & Print MIS and a B2B web-to-print platform
WWOL outlets all offer some digital printing, design and communications solutions but the offset heavy-lifting emanates from Crystal Printing Solutions in Perth.
Zaltsman believes Australia’s printers are not factoring their capital equipment into their costs per job nearly enough. He says efficient, quality printing is the only solution that can sustain price competitiveness, and that standalone operators, saddled with long makereadies, high waste and high labour costs, all the while offering cutthroat prices, are usually on their last gasp. “By looking at their prices, you can almost read the tea leaves on which company will fold next.”
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