The used SM 102 was bought through ASI Australia and is due to be installed at the new PMP Maxum site in the Auckland suburb of Mount Wellington.
The press is intended to enhance the PMP’s position in the sheetfed offset sector, said executive general manager Peter Browne.
“We’re a little unique in that we’re investing at a pretty difficult time in the market, but we really needed to get serious on the sheetfed side of things if we were going to be a key competitor to the likes of Geon and Blue Star,” Browne told ProPrint.
“There’s a gap in the market between web work and sheetfed work, and we’ve got a lot of magazines sitting in that 15,000-25,000 range. We believe this press provides a good economic solution for that area of the market, which is a big part of our business.”
Browne said the press will enhance PMP’s ability to provide clients with cost-effective print.
“At this point in time we have the most comprehensive range of solutions for quarto and A4 heatset, traditional sheetfed, reelfed sheetfed and digital,” he said.
“We have some large customers with a pretty diverse range. If you look at ACP, they do something like 40 titles, from Woman’s Day with 160,000 copies a week down to 10,000 copies of Autotrader. We have the ability to serve some of those customers end-to-end.”
Browne said CutStar would help PMP leverage its position as the largest buyer of commercial reels in Australasia.
The company is currently in the process of relocating its sheetfed and digital print teams, Maxum Real Estate and Printworld, to the Mount Wellington site.
“This makes for one business unit and we think we’ll get some morale and cultural benefits, as well as some synergies, from having the sales and customer services teams located within one operation,” Browne said.
“We tried to get something that fits what the business needs: much better workflows, a lot of office space, and certainly some room for growth, particularly in that digital area. So we think it will meet our three to five-year needs.”
ASI partner Alex Rio said the press, which is being installed now and should be running within a month, had been shipped from a defunct printer in Midwest USA and had just 12 million impressions on the clock.
Rio added: “I actually went overseas and personally inspected the machine to make sure. I also sent an NZ engineer to the US to make sure the loading was done correctly.”
He said CutStar would offer PMP savings of up to 10-15% due to lower stock cost for reels as well as time savings. Rio added that PMP could now run heavier stocks for magazines as well as low-cost stocks for inserts on the one machine.
“PMP probably saved 40% on the price of a new machine,” he added.
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