Malayala Manorama, with a daily circulation nearing 2.3 mil- lion copies, continues its modernization to double-width presses at all centres with the purchase of five Muller Martini mailroom systems to evacuate copies from its five Mitsubishi 4 x 1 presses on order. The five double- width Mitsubishi Diamond Spirit SA newspaper presses will be installed at its printing plants at Kozhikode, Kottayam and Kollam.
The Mitsubishi 4 x 1 DiamondSpir- it-SA presses for Malayala Manorama are rated at 75,000 copies an hour with a cutoff of 546 mm (21.5-inches) and a web width of 1,400mm (55-inches). These are slimmed down single-cir- cumference blanket cylinder versions of the Mitsubishi DiamondSpirit 4 x 1 presses first installed at Kasturi and Sons in India and subsequently by many Japanese newspapers.
Manorama’s press lines will be con- figured with four 4+4 (4-Hi) tower print- ing units, one 1+1 printing unit, a 2:2 single rotary folder and five reel stands. This means that a 40-page broadsheet daily with 32 pages in colour and 8 black and white pages can be produced at one go. The presses will be operated by the Mitsubishi press control system with au- tomated features that include ink pre- setting with CtP interface, various press presets, automatic webbing up, auto- matic dual web tension control and au- tomatic colour register control.
The five identical NewsGrips from Muller Martini will ensure syn- chronized evacuation of copies using single grippers for each copy from the printing press to the loading ramps. Since there are no intervening opera- tions such as inserting or stitching or trimming, the five new generation Muller Martini conveyers will deliver the printed copies directly from the press to the ten NewsStack stacker bundlers in the mailroom.
Established 126 years ago, Malayala Manorama is the flagship Malayalam dai- ly of the group which also publishes more than 40 magazines, and owns tel- evision channels, FM radio stations, and internet portals. “Printed newspapers continue to be the main source of our company’s revenue and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future,” says chief editor, Mammen Mathew, ex- plaining the major investment.
New generation NewsGrip
The centrepieces of the state-of-the-art mailroom systems are the latest gener- ation NewsGrip conveyor chains, each with a receiving and delivery station. They not only have a new control sys- tem, but also feature new guide sections, are easier to maintain and have a longer economic life-time. In addition, the five lines, which will come on-stream be- tween December 2014 and December 2015, each include two NewsStack com- pensating stackers, Solema belts, a Sit-
ma bundle film wrapper with
cross strapping, manual ap- plication of pre-printed top sheets and a control system for bundle production.
Faster than the printing press
Mathew explains that Malayala Manora- ma opted for the solution from Muller Martini, due to financial and technical reasons. “We calculated the total cost of ownership of all the proposals we re- ceived and Muller Martini stood first. The maximum speed of 90,000 cycles per hour for the mailroom exceeds that of our new printing press by 15,000 copies. That means the mailroom sys- tems are not producing at their limit, which lowers maintenance costs and in- creases their economic life-time.”
In addition to the good after-sales support by Muller Martini India, the feedback given by another Indian Muller Martini customer also spoke well of the new solution and served as a ref- erence install by another major daily in South India. Mammen Mathew says, “I enquired from The Hindu about their ex- perience with the Muller Martini mail- room systems and received positive reviews from them.”
