The heatset revival of Navi Mumbai

The heatset revival of Navi Mumbai

By Naresh Khanna, Editor, Indian Printer and Publisher

Significantly, Navi Mumbai has come into its own as a printing center, which it never did, in its previous incarnation as New Bombay. The failed businesses of the past — Conway, Tata Press and others, are replaced by the thriving survivors of the Bombay printing industry — Silverpoint, Print House, and Repro. Kala Jyothi Process has moved one of its heatsets and a sheetfed from Hyderabad to its new plant in Taloja, Navi Mumbai.

The Navi Mumbai print industry has also received a boost from the new and upcoming newspaper plants of Lokmat, Indian Express, HT Media, DNA, and Bennet Coleman,and of course the newly established commercial printing unit of Thomson at Aeroli. The heatset work includes not only the colour supplements for the ever-increasing number of dailies but also the new magazines with some anticipation of print exports.

Silverpoint
Silverpoint started its web offset operation in Navi Mumbai just a bit more than a year ago with a second hand Harris M 1000 press for printing 4 over 4. They have also got a 25-inch wide 5-unit Albert heatset press with a 17.75 inch cut-off used for childrens’ books, magazine covers and occasionally magazines. Using an Agfa CtP installed in the web division by their prepress partner Shivam, the plant turns out high quality heatset printing for numerous magazines.

Silverpoint Web Division’s General Manager Nirvan Karandikar says that the runs are not long, although some of the magazines are about 50,000. What we have learned from talking to several publishers and web printers is that many of the new niche magazine circulations are less than 30,000, and that gives you a good idea of the space that many publishers are looking at.

These publishers have the choice of several heatset webs in the Mumbai area including Infomedia (the erstwhile Tata Press), Print House, Magna, Repro, Soni Graphics, and now Thomson Press, with Kala Jyothi also coming on line. This has kept the quality high and the rates competitive and put Mumbai back on the map as a leading magazine publishing centre apart from just the movie magazines.

Thomson Press Aeroli
Thomson Press is one of the country’s biggest multi-location printers and exporters and as such on-going story. The Mumbai project required an extensive search and development of what ultimately turned out to be a seventeen and a half acre site initially developed by Proctor and Gamble. The first new presses to go in were multicolour sheetfeds from Mitsubishi.

A highly automated new Goss M600D was ordered with a marvellous new technology Vivo bundler stacker from Muller Martini that produces perfect 47 inch logs of printed signatures and optimises both pressroom space and bindery throughput. Several older machines both web and sheetfed have also been shipped from the mother plant in Faridabad.

In addition Thomson has found some used web presses containing in-line stations with operations that are extremely useful for fulfilling large export orders of specialty products. The Thomson plant in Aeroli with large capacity and a good mix of new automated equipment and second hand special purpose machines seems to have got off to a good start.

For now the centrepiece is the just installed Goss M600D which we saw running at 68,000 copies an hour while printing a relatively small magazine signature run of only 40,000 copies. On the day, an artificial intelligence type of process for calibrating and monitoring the quality and speeding up the press was being implemented.

Apparently the press automation controls have to go through a learning cycle of about 10 to 20 print runs after which the controls become calibrated or intelligent as to the various operating conditions, prepress data inputs, and ink density outcomes that are mainly measured by the QTI CCS atthe end of the folder.

With initial settings based on prepress data sent through a CIP4 link, the press is put on autopilot and the makeready takes place at about 17,000 copies an hour. After adjusting the registration and receiving feedback on various parameters including the QTI CCS controls, the press speeds up automatically to 40,000 copies an hour.

The same feedback plateau continues for some time and apparently some minor dampening adjustments take place before the press automatically takesitself to the next level of 60,000 and again another monitoring cycle. While we were there the press reached a speed of 68,000 briefly, before the job was over.

The Faridabad brand
The Aeroli site is a massive piece of real estate just 40 kilometres from the Nava Sheva port and as such well poised for commercial printing exports. The already built-up plant occupies seven acres and is already being extended. In the long run, the built up space will double as this plant keeps adding a mix of the best and most appropriate technologies in commercial printing. We expect that the investments in this plant will soon exceed Rs 120 crore (US$ 30 million).

Having first visited Thomson in Faridabad more than 30 years ago we hoped but did not think that we would live to see the industrial city as one of the foremost printing brands in the country. However Thomson’s Aeroli unit is one of its best expansion units and veterans of the Faridabad plant run it in the main. There is a tremendous team spirit and pride that the skills and experience of the advanced pressmen, engineers and managers from Thomson Faridabad, led by their unusual General Manager Deepak Talwar, have put this new project into place and are able to daily execute high value print orders for both the local market and for exports.

This is a new technology plant with the highly automated and marvellous Goss 600D, the Vivo bundler log stacker, the new Mitsubishi sheetfed presses, the fast Screen CtP, a huge automated bindery including a complete new Muller Martini Accoro A7 perfect binding line, Amigo perfect binder, Ventura thread-sewing machine, a Presto saddle stitcher and all the other peripherals that go into a modern printing plant anywhere in the world. However, it is the team from Thomson Faridabad that has built this plant. Faridabad remains the benchmark for problem solving, quality and productivity.