“Ibelieve the Indian newspaper market could be very interesting,” says Damian Staedeli, head of printing, ABB Switzerland. “However, it seems a bit difficult for us right now because most of the newspapers, apart from the very large ones, have very low automated machines. Bigger companies like Times of India and Anandabazar Patrika, which possess sizeable machines can benefit by using our system. Times of India, for instance, can be an interesting customer although it has mainly manroland presses. Nevertheless, we are in contact with them and developing some ideas for future projects.”
India is a rather small market for ABB. “Our main market segments include Europe and the United States. We have few installations in India, and Asia overall. With the decline of the printing market in Europe, there are no new presses delivered anywhere, at least the big ones. In India, we are talking to a couple of press manufacturers to understand what we can do for them,” says Staedeli. “Of course our main market is retrofit of our own installation base.”
Staedeli further adds, “India is developing pretty fast and newspaper circulation in the country is growing too. However, sooner or later there will be similar problems like the West. It is likely that the problems exists already—the efficiency of production needs to be increased and we need to be more industrialized even though labour is still cheap in India. It will take some time for this to happen. If the time is right, we are here to help our customers, especially with integration, when it comes to managing the overall process, such as in multi-site planning. We have tuned our organization to increase our competitiveness and to further emphasize our commitment to longterm support of our customers.”
ABB is a leading automation supplier to the newspaper industry. ABB Printing (www.abb.com/ printing) delivers solutions that provide unique and totally integrated end-to-end control, protect existing investments and provide management information essential to improving profitability. ABB is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 140,000 people.
