Yoshiharu Komori, chairman and CEO of Komori Corporation and the chief guest at the Mumbai Print Summitspoke about future of the printing industry. Focussing on the likely scenario from his own viewpoint and industry research, Komori was quite positive about offset printing in the foreseeable future but nevertheless pointed out that as digital printing evolves and grows, it will increasing be dominated by inkjet production. To this end he spoke about his company’s workwith both Konica Minolta and the Landa Corporation for inkjet presses that will be shown at IGAS 2015 and drupa 2016, respectively. While the B2 KM1 will be shown running at IGAS 2015 in September this year, the B1 format Landa Nano inkjet initially aimed at the packaging industry will be shown at drupa in May 2016.
The visit of the Komori chairman was accompanied by a program organized by their Indian distributor Insight on the evening before in Mumbai and another event organized in Delhi on the day following the Print Summit. At both events apart from Yoshiharu Komori speaking about the future of print, technical presentations on Komori’s highly automated packaging sheetfed presses was made by Toshiyasu Kubotera as well. At the Mumbai event, there was also an important presentation of the webfed Komori Chambon presses that are used for longer run packaging and that can be as or more productive than very large format sheetfed presses.
The Komori visit to Mumbai and Delhi gave an interesting opportunity for the chairman of the company to meet with more of his company’s customers (some of whom from Mumbai had visited Japan recently to invite him to come to India for the Print Summit) and for him to get a sense of what they wanted. It was clear from the questions in both cities that on the one hand that Indian printers are embracing Komori’s technology and that there is also a great hunger for training – for help in creating and improving the human resource. From Komori’s comments in both places, it is clear that he is keen for the Indian market to absorb a much larger number of his company’s presses. Enthused by the events of the past month, Yoshiharu Komori said that he will return in the first half of February to take part in the Printpack exhibition in Greater Noida in the Delhi NCR.
