At the same time distribution subsidiary, WRH Marketing announced the promotion of former Ferag Australia MD, Thomas Klumpp to the position of CEO of WRH as Guido Steffen vacates the job to join the board.
The first of the innovations, MiniSert , is an entry-level inserter bringing automated inserting within reach of smaller circulation newspapers which have until now relied upon manual insertion. With an inserting speed of 20,000 per hour, the MiniSert rounds out Ferag’s line of inserters, which offer speeds of up to 75,000 per hour to satisfy publishers with large and small circulations alike.
Foreshadowed at drupa earlier this year, the MiniSert is of modular design, its main components being the hopper group, the inserting module and the stacker. Ferag is ready to deliver the MiniSert within eight-weeks from order; installation and training takes a further five days before full production can begin.
The first MiniSert production unit has been sold to Dar Al Khaleej Printing & Publishing of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates whose titles include the daily Al Khaleej, one of the most popular Arabic-language newspapers in the Emirates.
The second innovation shown was the UniCover40, which runs at an unprecedented 40,000 folded sheets hour, twice the speed of most conventional cover hoppers and was developed in response to customer demands. This high speed means the UniCover can be connected directly to Ferag’s high-performance UniDrum gatherer-stitcher, introducing for the first time the processing of magazine covers in the form of unfolded sheets coming directly from the press to the gatherer-stitcher drum, removing the time-consuming and costly intermediate step of folding on a separate machine.
Both the MiniSert and UniCover40 were demonstrated at Ferag subsidiary, Print Media Corporation’s (PMC) userpark in Oetwil am See. The userpark is used not only for live demonstrations of Ferag technology, but also for training operators on equipment in a live production environment. Staff of Australia’s Offset Alpine are among those who’ve trained at PMC’s userpark.
Ferag will be exhibiting on Stand 140 at the World Publishing Expo 2012 (Ifra Expo & Conference) at Frankfurt Messe, Germany, from October 29-31.
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