The new presses will be installed in a quartet of News printing sites around the UK over the next three to four years, and will print 13 million copies a week of the country’s best known titles including the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times.
MAN Roland says a greater commitment to print and the printed newspaper is hard to imagine. News has been MAN Roland printing technology for more than 20 years in the UK, at the end of 1987 Rupert Murdoch gave MAN Roland what is still the biggest order ever placed for printing presses and accessories with a value of around one billion Deutschmarks (more than Euro500m, $A800m).
All but two of the new COLORMAN presslines are equipped with five CD 15 reel splicers, five nine-cylinder satellite printing towers, and a newly-developed folder with a 4:7:7 cylinder ratio. They can produce around 86,000 copies per hour with 120 four-color pages. The maximum web width is 2,211mm and the cut-off length is 578mm. The two presslines for Scotland have six reel splicers, six printing towers, and one folder, which enable them to produce up to 144 pages. The printing systems can also be run together as a broadsheet press. The AUROload automatic reel supply system will load the reel splicers, and the triple-width, two-high folder superstructures each with three-ribbon stitchers guarantee enormous flexibility. The COLORMAN lines are to be controlled by PECOM, a module of the printnet family. News has also decided to completely network the printing facilities with printnet, the production management system from MAN Roland and its subsidiary company ppi Media.
Gerd Finkbeiner, CEO of MAN Roland: “This project represents a landmark development in terms of economy and quality for the successful future of the printed newspaper.“ He clearly dismisses speculation from some quarters that the News order has taken up all of MAN Roland’s capacity: “This order gives us a good capacity utilisation basis for the next three or four years and that’s of course very pleasing. But speculation that we will have to put other orders on the back burner or that we can’t accept any new ones is absolutely unfounded. We have prepared ourselves professionally for this project and our capacity is designed to cope with orders of this magnitude. All our other orders will be handled as normal. And we will be fighting for every new order like we always do.”
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