The chief executive offi cers of the two companies – Dr. Michael Faller (fourth from left) and Dr. Daniel Keesman (second from right) from Faller, and
Rainer Hundsdörfer (fourth from right) from Heidelberg–and their teams are looking forward to the digital future.
Waldkirch, Germany based August Faller GmbH & Co. KG has placed an advance order for the Primefire 106 digital printing system from Heidelberg, becoming one of the first customers in the world. The company makes folding cartons, package inserts, and adhesive labels as well as combination products and packaging services.
The decision to invest in the machine was driven by the fact that pharmaceutical and healthcare market is increasingly moving towards specialized medicinal products. As a result, the packaging runs for these specially developed medicines are becoming ever shorter, along with the delivery times.
“We specialize in the production of secondary packaging for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, and see ourselves as a supply chain partner to our customers,” explains managing partner Dr. Michael Faller. “The diversity of the Primefire technology will create new opportunities in packaging production, which is increasingly moving towards customization, serialization, and digitization.”
“As a specialist in offset printing, high print image quality is also crucial for us. Our print tests on the Primefire showed coverage of 95% of the Pantone color space. Furthermore the result achieved with the substrates we used was identical to that of offset printing. End customers will not be able to notice any difference compared with conventional offset printing results at first glance,” says Peter Ganter, director of the PharmaServiceCenter Folding Cartons in Waldkirch.
August Faller currently uses ten Heidelberg sheetfed presses in 50 x 70 cm format at its sites in Waldkirch and Lodz in Poland. It also has two die-cutting machines and nine folder gluers from Heidelberg for its postpress needs.
The August Faller Group is constantly working on its digitization strategy. “Digital printing is an important link in the digitization of our administrative and productive processes. By networking digital printing with our preprint processes and the digital ordering and job system, we will increase the profitability and flexibility of our processes in the long term and, by doing so, also generate benefits for customers,” explains Jörg Frischkorn, head of European operations for Faller.
The Primefire 106 was presented at drupa 2016 and is the first industrial digital printing system in B1 format. The first field test was recently started, and a further one is due to start at the end of the year. Heidelberg is on schedule with the market launch, with demand from customers already outstripping production capacity.
2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India
Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and
multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.
The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry.
While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately
their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book
printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.
The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.
Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.
Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.
Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.
