Landa has announced a new press order for an S11P inkjet press, complete with a perfector, which is the second new order since the company filed for bankruptcy and was acquired by the private equity firm FIMI last September. However, this is the first order that Landa has been able to make public.
The customer in question is Henan Grandprint Co, better known as Grandprint, and which appears to be part of the Shengda Intelligent Printing Group from Henan province. This company has already installed one Landa S11P in its Yongcheng plant in 2024. However, the second press, which is due to be installed after next week’s Chinese New Year* celebrations, will go to another as yet unspecified site.
The new press will have seven colours plus coating, which is the same configuration as Grandprint’s first Landa. Cui Wenfeng, chairman of Grandprint Co, commented, “The investment in Landa is an important part of Shengda’s digital strategy. The S11P allows us to shift short-run offset work to digital and easily take on more packaging jobs. Every day, we produce more than 1,000 different jobs on our S11P, spanning from commercial printing to short-run folding carton packaging. We are very pleased with the partnership we have with Landa. Their team has been there every step of the way, adapting to our needs. This trust and partnership facilitated our investment in our second Landa press.”
The company, which was founded in 2000, has its headquarters in Zhengzhou, though its main production site is at Yongcheng, both of which are in Henan, in the heart of China’s manufacturing region. Shengda has three further production sites—one in Tianshui City in Gansu province, another at Tianjin, and a further plant at Chengdu, all backed up by warehousing and distribution across 200 cities in China.
Yarden Ben-Dor, vice president of product and Landa’s main PR contact, told me, “Landa has a service team in China, capable of easily supporting a different site outside Yongcheng; logistics-wise, we are cooperating with third parties for storage and delivery in China.” He says that Landa has a “handful of presses in China,” including two perfecting presses, one of which is presumably the first of the Grandprint presses at Yongcheng.
Landa refused to confirm that Komori would deliver the chassis to the customer site for Landa to install the inkjet unit on site, though it’s still my understanding that this is how Landa intends to build its presses. However, Ben-Dor did say, “Landa is responsible for the delivery and installation. The installation of a Landa press takes typically five weeks, (and) we expect it to be of a similar duration.”
The fact that Landa has managed to sell two new presses in the six months or so since it collapsed into bankruptcy does suggest that the new team has had some success in turning the company around. It’s too early to say that Landa has recovered, but the company has clearly turned a corner, and this is a positive step forward for it. And for no,w of course, Landa is still the only option for anyone who wants a B1 inkjet press.
According to Ben-Dor, Landa currently has close to 50 presses in the field. He added: “We had to let some team members go, but we are still running operations, service, and sales in three subsidiaries (China, Europe, and Americas), as well as R&D, product, operations, admin, etc. in our HQ in Israel. We operate two ink plants in the Netherlands and the United States, our own blanket manufacturing facility, and, of course, our system plants to manufacture our presses.”
You can find more details on Grandprint from sd2000.com and on the presses from landanano.com.
* Year of the fire horse, supposedly lucky for those of us born under this sign.
