Kerala’s second biggest daily Mathrubhumi which is also a magazine and book publisher and printer, has seen a comprehensive upgradation of its technological capabilities in the past few years. With its broadsheet circulation touching 1.5 million copies in Kerala’s highly literate and competitive media environment the modernization exercise was practically a necessity. From 2011 to early 2015, Mathrubhumi installed three TKS Color Top 5000UDI 4 x 1 presses at its printing plants in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kannur. Alongside the three TKS 4 x 1 presses and its other 2 x 1 presses, Mathrubhumi installed ten Ferag mailrooms with high-speed drum inserters in the past five years.
Each TKS 5000UDI 4 x 1 press can produce 32 broadsheet pages combining 16 color and 16 black and white pages at a maximum speed of 75,000 copies an hour. Alternatively, 24 pages can be printed in full color at 75,000 copies an hour. Each of the TKS 4 x 1 presses with a web width of 1,400 mm is configured with three full-color towers and two folders with 546 mm cut-off.
The other seven plants are employing Manugraph presses. In Kerala, Mathrubhumi is printed from ten locations — Kozhikode, Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Kochi, Thrissur, Kannur, Palakkad, Malappuram, Kollam and Alappuzha. Outside Kerala, it is published from Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi
The Kochi plant also has a Manugraph 2 x 1 press which is dedicated to printing BennettColeman’s The Times of India broadsheet daily in English. Mathrubhumi also prints The Times of India at its plants in Thiruvananthapuram, Alleppey, Trichur and Malappuram. The five plants print about 90,000 copies of The Times of India every day with the Kochi plant printing the highest number of copies at 30,000.
State-of-the-art plant at Kozhikode
Mathrubhumi will begin the next phase in its modernization plant when the monsoon season ends this year – this is a state-of-the-art 8-acre plant at Kozhikode. “Kozhikode being our headquarters was the obvious location for this ambitious project,” says Bhasi PT, general manager, production and maintenance at Mathrubhumi.
The new Kozhikode plant is being built for printing newspapers, books and magazines as well as a logistics and dispatch section. It will also house the company’s online department while a major section of the TV operation which is currently run from Thiruvananthapuram may also be shifted to the proposed plant. Mathrubhumi has brought in a leading Spanish architectural and engineering consulting firm, BOD Arquitectura e Ingeniería SA to design the new premises.In the newspaper section at the new plant, TKS press lines and Ferag mailroom equipment will be the standard. The TKS 4 x 1 press in Kozhikode will however, have a slightly different configuration from the currently running TKS presses. It will have an additional tower, that is, four towers and four reel stands.
For magazines production, Mathrubhumi recently signed an agreement to purchase a TKS heatset web offset press. “A few other commercial presses will also be employed alongside the TKS,” says Bhasi. In its bindery section, the publishing house will be adding a Muller Martini Primera MC. “Our earlier deal was for Primera but Muller Martini launched the upgraded Primera MC version at drupa. So we modified the deal for the upgraded version at drupa 2016,” says Bhasi. For book binding the plan is to replace some of the existing Welbound systems. While in prepress, Mathrubhumi has an Atex editorial publishing system and the Atex Web CMS. It has ordered 21 Krause CtP systems in the drupa time frame. “The work on the new plant in Kozhikode will start immediately after the monsoons are over and should be over by the second half of 2017,” he concludes.
