On 16 and 18 March, KBA together with their distributor Indo-Polygraph machinery organised open house events at two of their long-time customers in Delhi, Rakesh Press, and Gopsons Papers Limited, respectively. At both open house events, Dietmar Heyduck, KBA Asia Pacific vice president sales, and Hartmut Stamm, sales manager for KBA sheetfed presses, and Aditya Surana of Indo Polygraph addressed the gathered printers.

Dietmar Heyduck and Hartmut Stamm congratulated both Rakesh Press and Gopsons on their new Rapida press installations and invited the local printers to the KBA open house in Germany in April. Hartmut Stamm in his presentation spoke of the five USPs of the KBA Rapida presses -- design concept, the drivetronic shaftless feeder, sheet travel, the inking unit, and the unique remote maintenance system.

Aditya Surana spoke about the Indian printing industry, “We are witnessing a new thinking as printers are now believing more and more in the philosophy of buying brand new machines. This has led to strong growth in press sales in the past year and the present year also looks good.” As far as KBA sales he said, “We have been able to get repeat orders due to our very strong service support. Whether you are in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad or any other city or town we provide 24x7 service. We have been able to attain higher growth by emphasising our ‘unconditional warranty’. We put no guarantee clause related to inks or paper.”

At the Rakesh Press open house event in Naraina Industrial Area in West Delhi, Rakesh Bagai spoke of why he bought a 5-colour plus coater press. He told the gathering, “It is essential to differentiate our printing business from others who may also have just a 4-colour press by offering much higher quality that takes advantage of our Kodak thermal CtP and also to add value with a fifth colour unit for special colours and metallic inks as well in-line coating. Coating also allows us to print better solids and to quickly turn the job over to print the other side and so deliver it in time.” Rakesh said that it may take a bit of time to get higher paying work requiring a fifth colour and coating but that was the plan.

At the Gopsons Paper Limited open house at their 110,000 square feet plant in Sector 64 Noida, across the river from Delhi, Sunil and Vasant Goel Directors of Gopsons, welcomed the local printers together with Aditya Surana of IndoPoygraph. The open house also marked the public inaugural of another new KBA Rapida in a pressroom that is chock full of them, this time a KBA Rapida 105 Universal 4-colour press. Dietmar Heyduck congratulated the Goels and Gopsons and informed the gathering that Gopsons has ordered one more press from KBA – a larger format Rapida 130A -- which would arrive very soon.

Vasant Goel thanked KBA for their support and said, “We fully believe in the technology and service support of KBA. It was in 2003 that we installed our first KBA presses – a Rapida 105 4-colour and Rapida 74 5-colour press. Since then our experience with KBA has been quiet satisfactory. We used to previously wonder how we would be able to run these machines, but the support provided by KBA has made us run these machines at full speed. The remote service has been also quite good.”

“The cost of the new machines has turned out to be minimal with their quality output. The running cost is less, the same job can be run with matching colour densities across three different KBA machines with the same quality output,” he added.

At the open house events at both Rakesh Press and at Gopsons Papers, several jobs were printed to demonstrate the capability of the presses and to also demonstrate quick changeover and makeready with minimal wastage in bringing the press to full speed.