Tag: flexo

The Idealliance India G7 Expert and Professional Training and Certification Program, conducted by Steve Smiley in Mumbai, was a significant milestone for skills training in our somewhat fragmented industry. The program, initially designed for 25 candidates, saw 27 participants and ended with a huge amount of cheers and smiles. We couldn’t have asked for more but, most importantly, for us as well as for our stakeholders, the larger objective of our endeavour—to create G7 certified color technologists in India—was met. The program included engineers and application specialists for wide web flexo, gravure and offset. We had prepress technicians from gravure, flexo and offset; press engineers and operators; and color management practitioners and consultants from South, West and North India as well as from Singapore and the Middle East.

Bloomflex, a new Hyderabad-based start-up, has installed an 8-color Soma Premia 1050 CI flexo press. The company will produce flow wraps, wicket bags, pouches for hygiene and personal products, baby and adult diapers, edible-oil, milk, cheese. In addition it will produce several intermediate products as well as pouches and carry bags for wholesale and retail outlets with chosen concepts for added technical and aesthetic values. “We have started Bloomflex with an aim to produce environmentally friendly products that would be accepted worldwide,” says Prasant Mohanty, vice president – operations at Bloomflex. From all accounts this is an ambitious project with quite a few expansion ideas in the pipeline.

IppStar has been involved in three surveys including one with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that looked at the leading Indian offset printer’s awareness and use of color management. A more recent survey by another organization vindicated IPPStar’s training activity and pointed out that amongst its respondents only 17% use color management. This means that there is a huge opportunity for improvement in quality, print optimization, standardization and cost saving for printers that want to have a combination of excellence while saving time and cost.

Rossini, one of the global leaders in rubber rollers, mandrels and sleeve technology for gravure and flexo for narrow and wide web is already an established entity in India. And it is amongst the few international companies which has taken the bold step of setting up a manufacturing plant in India. Rossini India has been doing quite well says Marco Caccia, managing director of Rossini India. Rossini’s Indian factory was inaugurated in September 2014. This is the first Rossini plant in Asia and it was driven by customer demands from this region says Ashvin Hebbar of Rossini India. Good quality rubber rollers in India were quite expensive and there was acute requirement in the market. After the plant was set up, the operations started around April 2015.

At drupa 2016, Italian firm Comiflex SRL and India’s largest global flexible packaging solution company Uflex shook hands to manufacture gear and gearless CI Flexo printing machines under a technology transfer agreement at the latter’s engineering plant in Noida, India. Speaking to Packaging South Asia, Uflex group president (corporate finance and accounts) RK Jain said, “Comiflex is an international company with expertise in manufacturing various kinds of flexo printing machines. With the transfer of the technical know-how from Comiflex, we will be producing gear and gearless CI flexo presses at our Engineering Plant in Noida. The printing machines will be for both Indian and overseas markets.”

Toyo Ink, Toyo Ink Arets and Toyo-Morton will be exhibiting together at drupa 2016 (Hall 4 Stand B39). The three firms will jointly showcase a wide range of printing and packaging solutions designed to help brand owners and package printers reduce wastage throughout the supply chain, lesson environmental risks, enhance food safety and achieve uniform packaging quality worldwide.

Bobst will present an advanced range of technology and process solutions in printing and converting for the global label industry at Labelexpo Americas in Rosemont, ILL, USA, from 13 to 15 September 2016. Star of the show on Bobst’s stand will be the digital flexo process which will be demonstrated on the Bobst M6 mid-web inline UV flexo press. The advantages of digital flexo, which is part of Bobst Digital Automation programme, are unique in making the press operation fast, flexible and reliable, allied with a consistently superior quality of the output and the lowest total cost of ownership.

Laurel Brunner writes, “Drupa 2016’s attendance and sales numbers show that print is in rude health.” (Just so this British idiom is not misunderstood – if someone’s in rude health, they are very healthy and look it.) Brunner writes this in the context of sustainability but I am quoting her so that our readers can benefit from the considered opinion of a savvy industry expert.