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FFEI helps gather strength for violet CtPs in India

November 10, 2009

FFEI is a technology company that is an offshoot of Fuji's UK operation. The company manufactures violet CtP output devices at its factory north of London and markets these around the world through OEM vendor channels. In India, FFEI sells its CtPs branded by Fuji and TechNova and under its own Alinte brand. At IFRA Chennai, the commercial manager of FFEI Charlie Seccombe was pleased by the very focused audience of newspapers at the expo.

Charlie Seccombe, Commercial Manager, FFEI

FFEI introduced two new violet newspaper CtP products to expand the Alinte News range to cover CtP newspaper requirements from high volume dailies to local weeklies. The new Alinte News VN10 and Alinte News VN20, are both semi-automatic machines giving productivity rates of 50 and 75 Berliner plates per hour respectively at 1016 dpi. Both had their worldwide launch at IFRA India on the Fujifilm and TechNova stands. Below are excerpts of our conversation with Seccombe pertaining to the CtP business in India.

Indian Printer and Publisher — How is the response at IFRA Expo Chennai?
Charlie Seccombe — We have gotten a very good response for the world wide premiere of the VM series and we have visitors come in from not just the region surrounding Chennai but all over India, with end users visiting both of our distributors.

IPP -- How is the overall sales response from the Indian market?
Charlie Seccombe -- Beginning from Drupa last year we have done quite well -- since we have sold about 85 machines in the last 18 months, and crossed 50 in this calendar year. All of these are new machines -- we are running at just over five machines a month. We did not quite expect to reach those numbers because of competitive response, and now we are almost expecting a slight backlash. Interestingly, according to our distributor's numbers, the Indian commercial CtP market before drupa was 90 per cent thermal and now it is nearly 70 per cent violet.

IPP -- What are your brands and channels in India?
Charlie Seccombe -- The only two official distributors for FFEI in India are TechNova and Fuji. We are shipping 5 machines a month some of them are FFEI branded and some are Fuji branded. We effectively have three brands here -- Viostar the OEM brand of TechNova, the Fuji Luxel brand and our own FFEI Alinte brand. So we have a mix of three brands, we have some in newspapers but mostly in commercial.

IPP -- Where are the FFEI CtPs manufactured?
Charlie Seccombe -- All the machines are manufactured in the UK in a high tech factory. We are one of the last companies who are still manufacturing in the UK and we are still quite competitive. We have a contract with Fuji worldwide to design and manufacture their CtP machines. Fuji is one of our largest customers. We also manufacture for TechNova in India and for Founders in China. So FFEI has evolved into a technology company, we have our own brand which we would like to promote and expand. When FFEI was bought out of Fuji we had one customer which was Fuji, now over the last three years we have diversified our customer base and Fuji now represents a little over 50 per cent of our business and we value Fuji's business greatly. We have made partnerships with TechNova in India with Founders in China and we are going to announce some partnerships in South America in the near future.