At a press conference in Delhi on 5 May 2015, Rave Scans announced the installation of the country’s first Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102-6 color plus coater UV combination press with Foilstar – the 59th Heidelberg Foilstar installation in the world. Rave India started in 1993 as a prepress house in Delhi that eventually had five high-end scanners and five imagesetters. Since September 2005, with the installation of a new 5-color SpeedMaster 74 press it has been one of the fastest growing printers in the country. The company now has three plants – in Delhi, Gurgaon and Manesar. The new Foilstar is installed at Rave’s new 150,000 square foot packaging plant in Manesar.
Simple yet technologically advanced, the new Heidelberg press at Rave comes with third generation Foilstar technology. In the press, cold foil is applied in-line using two of the offset printing units, thus providing advantages of offset printing such as CtP imaged plates for foil, fast makeready, quick change over, low maintenance and low energy consumption. The first unit transfers adhesive that is picked up by the offset plate instead of ink and the second unit removes the foil from a ribbon or ribbons of cold foil running in the Foilstar. “The high-end technology behind this press makes printing faster and more consistent,” says Peter Rego, business unit head, equipment sales, Heidelberg India.
The use of cold foil allows subsequent units to be overprinted in the subsequent print units of the press to create metallics of varying color, tones and hues including halftone metallic effects. The Foilstar allows up to six parallel reels of cold foil to be run simultaneously. “The configuration can provide bigger saving in terms of foil used – about 30% of the foil can be saved just because of the latest foil indexing system,” says Deepak Walia, regional manager of Heidelberg India.
Labels, beverages, cosmetics, sweets boxes, cigarette boxes, magazines, books, greetings cards are some of the applications that can be decorated with metallic effects on the Foilstar. “Because only the metallic part of the foil is transferred, leaving behind the PET, the output is 100% recyclable and green. In this press, if you are printing 40 lakh sheets (4 million sheets) in a year, you save almost 133 tonnes of CO2 in comparison to any UV press which uses completely metallic polymer laminated substrates,” says Walia.
Shiv Bhatnagar, COO of Rave Packaging, says, “The new investment would boost the company’s capacity for security printing, as it is the only company in India which can do it. It can undertake security printing by directly printing four in-line colors on the foil in a single pass. Today only two kinds of printing are happening in India – one is conventional and the other is UV printing. Although UV is not a very environmentally friendly process, we invested in it in the past because it was the need of the hour at that time especially for printing on metalized polymer laminated board. But today we believe, foil is the future – of course it all depends on how we convert it and how we market it. The Foilstar from Heidelberg, integrated with the second generation Prinect image control, will give us an advantage in the market dominated by UV printing on metallized polyester board.”
During the course of the event, the company also spoke about the increasing demand for on high-end rigid boxes within the packaging segment. For this, the company has established itself as high luxury segment rigid box supplier and invested machines from Emmeci. At the Foilstar event, Rave announced its investment in additional Emmeci machines – in fact in highly automated mechatronic lines that make Rave the leader in this specialized segment. The company is clear that it wants the most productive technology that can make it competitive in high-end luxury packaging where the runs may not be very long but have relatively higher margins. “Rave Scans has always believed in investing in high-end machines,” says Shiv Bhatnagar. “Today 68% of our business is from commercial printing while 32% is from packaging of which 58% is from rigid boxes. But this 32% is on a huge growth trajectory now.”
The panel discussion on the stage included the Rave Scan partners Rakesh Bhatnagar and Bhavnesh Kumar, Klaus Nielsen and Peter Rego of Heidelberg, Mohit Jain of Anil Agencies and Mauro Mazzinghi, chairman and CEO of Emmeci as well as Shiv Bhatnagar. Although on technical issues Rakesh Bhatanagar publicly defers to his son, Klaus Nielsen recounting his experience credited the company’s overall visionary leadership in making it one of the fastest growing commercial printers in the country over the past decade. “Rakesh Bhatnagar’s drive in bringing the latest cutting-edge technology to the country includes Rave being the first Heidelberg XL 105 customer in India in 2006. In addition, we had the opportunity to train a young person like Shiv Bhatnagar and give him extensive exposure in some of the most productive printing plants in Germany. I remember Shiv’s great interest in golf and am quite pleased that he has now furthered this hand-on approach to the print business.”
