Teach you to invest and purchase flat sheet offset printing equipment

Through differentiated strategies and value-added printing solutions, printing companies can win the market and win business opportunities. To this end, Manroland has assembled well-known experts and scholars in China to comprehensively analyze the cutting-edge technologies and plans to help you embark on an efficient and high-energy printing tour.

Among various printing methods, sheet-fed offset printing presses still occupy a dominant position. According to customs statistics, the annual import volume of sheet-fed offset presses in China totals about 800 million U.S. dollars, and the number of such stands exceeds 1,000. The main importing countries are Germany and Japan. We believe that our printing companies are no strangers to these brands. The topic to be discussed today is how to select printing equipment that is suitable for enterprises to improve their competitiveness in today's severe market competition. Inappropriate, please correct me.

Printing companies are mainly divided into three major categories: book printing, business printing and packaging printing. Different types of printing companies have different priorities in selecting equipment. For example, book printing companies mostly consider “winning by quantity”, that is, long-run high-volume live printing of large quantities of paperbacked wireless glue binding lines, and the selection of equipment to open Four-color, eight-color flip or double-sided printing. Larger prints will consider commercial web machines. This is almost the normal choice for the development of book printing companies from small to large. It seems that there is not much differentiation or value-added connotation to be discovered. Actually, books and periodicals printing companies' equipment investment can also take some innovative routes. In the past, four-color printing followed by post-laminating books/magazines was completely replaced by four-color + water-based glazing on the line. This final product not only made people feel more upscale but also more environmentally friendly. Investing in such a five-color machine can not only print four-color + spot color jobs, but also print four-color + water-based glazing products, and its function conversion takes only five minutes. This equipment configuration also prepares companies for packaging printing.

Book printing companies rarely consider investing in large format sheetfed presses. In fact, this is a misunderstanding. Some full-open, ultra-wide format machines can be used to print high-end books and magazines. For example, the web 5 (890 x 1260mm) is just two pairs, and 32 pages of a4 format can be printed; the format 7b+ (1260 x 1620mm) is exactly three. Opposite, can print 48 pages of A4 format; and format 8 (1300 × 1850mm) is exactly four pairs, can print 64 A4 format. With the continuous rise of domestic land and labor costs, this investment concept is being accepted by people. The land occupied by a full boot is not much larger than the frontier, and only the same number of operating workers are needed. Face printing, as opposed to the two off four-color machine or a off eight color machine, its comprehensive cost is saved. In fact, many manufacturers in China have been using the full boot for packaging and printing other than books and commercial printing.

Usually, what we call business printing refers to the printing of various kinds of zero orders in society, such as advertisements, DM orders, car samples, building books, and catalog manuals. These kinds of printed materials are very time-sensitive and require fast delivery and printing quality. high. When choosing investment decisions, they often consider that the equipment “takes quick wins”, and printing companies that undertake such printing jobs often have extremely high requirements on the degree of automation of the selection equipment. For example, automatic loading of plates, non-disabled devices are necessary. The color control in printing has also become more and more important. The color control system can effectively improve the consistency of printing color and reduce the waste of school machines and overprinted papers by measuring and adjusting the ink density and spectrum of the printed signal strips. Selecting a high degree of automation of the printing press, although the initial equipment purchase cost is a bit higher, but after each daily job conversion time, job preparation time can be a lot of savings. Everyone should be clear about this economic account.

The application of CIP3/CIP4 printing network can greatly improve the preparation time of printing operations, such as the online acquisition of ctp prepress data, the production planning workstations that serve multiple machines, the monitoring of the running status of the printing press, etc., with the help of these network methods. , "Spend money to do big things" to further increase production efficiency. When purchasing equipment, at a minimum, the prepress data interface has become the most basic configuration requirement for most commercial printing plants.

The rapid development of the packaging and printing market has also been recognized as the most resistant to the impact of the new media. The areas involved include cigarette pack printing, wine packaging, pharmaceutical packaging, cosmetics packaging, and home appliance packaging printing. The performance requirements for packaging and printing equipment are often higher than those for printing equipment in other fields, because packaging and printing require the highest color consistency for different batches of live jobs in the same batch, which is only the basic requirement for anti-counterfeiting. The equipment configuration is often flexibly adjusted according to the customer's specific requirements, such as how many printing color groups, on-line light or double coating, drying unit and so on. Currently, in the global application of sheet-fed paper, according to customer's customized requirements, it can be configured to 16 or even 17 printing, glazing and drying modules.

The combination of UV printing and gloss printing presses are increasingly used in high-end cigarette packs and wine packaging printing fields in recent years. It can be said that most of the most expensive flat sheet printing equipment introduced in China has settled in recent years. In cigarette pack printing companies, a considerable part of them are installed in high-end liquor packaging printing companies, mainly printing on gold and silver cardboard or other non-absorbent materials such as PVC films and composite materials. As far as I know, the maximum configuration has reached 14 modular unit combinations (8-color full UV printing plus dual gloss and in-line drying units). Ordering such equipment, customers need to clearly understand the printing process requirements of the existing printing products, and predict the possible design and anti-counterfeiting requirements of the product in the future, to reasonably configure the equipment, so as to meet the technical requirements, but also ahead of the regional market competition .

The application of new technology is in the ascendant in the field of packaging and printing. UV printing is already very mature. Over the past few years, the in-line cold ironing has gradually attracted people’s attention. We are used to saying “cold ironing”. Actually, printing on pressurized cold foils will show brilliant colors. We can call it a brand-new printing method. , Just like 3D printing, although there are not many users who actually use in-line cold ironing because of the expensive materials and single supply, what will happen in the future? Some people are always exploring new value-added printing concepts. Performance, market-expanding equipment is the most powerful marketing tool for printing companies.

Financing leasing has promoted the development of printing companies, especially private enterprises. As long as the printing companies have sufficient funds to protect themselves, and there are clear market prospects for support, financing companies are happy to lend you money and help companies introduce better printing equipment in advance. Of course, companies can also choose other financing channels, such as bank loans, private lending and so on. However, any aggressive financing behavior is very dangerous. For example, some companies only have 20,000 yuan in cash, but they need to buy 20,000 units of equipment. This kind of leverage is too great; while some companies are too conservative and insist on using their own resources. Funding for the full amount of money to buy machines, without using a penny, certainly cannot be wrong. However, if the company is to become bigger and stronger, the development process will be very long and even lose opportunities for development.

Finally, the printing industry should be advised to consider the power of the brand machine when reinvesting equipment. In the printing machinery manufacturing industry, fifteen years ago it was far more than the current five, and the United States, Italy, and the Czech Republic all had a history of making offset presses, and now young entrepreneurs know a few about those brands. What is the historical origin of the high-end printer brand, quality reputation and long-term operation stability can bring unexpected confidence to the company and the advantages of market development. Although the initial purchase cost of the equipment is relatively high, the total cost over a five-year period of 10 years is definitely a worthwhile or even overvalued investment.