Colour Management Success Creates Best Results

Alwan Color Expertise recorded its best financial results last year with total sales values increasing by 50 per cent compared to 2006.

The company has also reported that during 2007 200 new customer sites received installations of its colour management systems.

According to Alwan Color Expertise sales peaked in 14 countries and were spear headed by distributors in all regions including the USA, Benelux countries, Italy and Scandinavia, for example.

The company also pointed to growing sales across its product range with CMYK Optimiser Print and Publish established its top selling product.

In North America, where sales rose by 500 per cent in 2007, the company said that its primary distributor in the USA, Pilot Marketing, was mainly responsible for the sales boost.

In the Benelux region 30 installations were completed, including one at the largest sheet-fed offset group Thieme, as well as systems sold to RSDB web offset printers for its various sites.

Pre-press companies such as Neroc' VGM and Edge Premedia also bought Alwan Colour Expertise systems.

Elie Khoury, Alwan's founder and president, commented: "By any standard, 2007 was Alwan's best year to date.

Sales revenues and the volume of units sold have never been higher.

The growth is even more spectacular when you consider that even with the drop in value of the US dollar, 20 per cent of our revenue came from the US market." In January 2007, the company added new personnel to the company including Patrick Van Dam as sales director, under whose guidance Alwan tripled its distribution channel.

Pilot Marketing's David Hunter, said: "I've been involved with colour in graphic arts since the 1980s and as a colour consultant I can attest to the many attempts many have made to make colour management a feasible and efficient process for our industry." He added: "Alwan Colour Expertise is one of the very few companies that has truly broken ground with systems that comprehensively address real colour issues from design through to printing.

It's very exciting to take Alwan in to resellers and shops because the results and the reactions received are immediate and significant." In addition to identifying and assisting resellers in implementing the latest developments in colour management and imaging, Hunter has served as a trainer and lecturer for conferences and organisations, including PIA/GATF.

There, he has taught the five-day course in implementing colour management.

One thousand participants since 1999 have attended his training sessions, added the company.

Amongst other installations that Hunter emphasised in North America was one at Sandy Alexander, a full-service graphic communications company.

Alwan's CMYK Optimiser is functioning as the focal point of the pre-press department, standardising CMYK files from all sources and providing output files that are compliant with specific printing press requirements.

That means improved printability, faster make-readies and a better match with proofs consistently, claimed Alwan Colour Expertise.

According to Menno Mooij of ISI: "Alwan's CMYK Optimiser is the right product at the right moment.

All Benelux printers are in the process of standardisation and automation.

CMYK Optimiser offers unique features that no other systems, including major pre-press products, perform, such as colour/TAC analysing, dynamic TAC and Devicelink profiling.

Those capabilities are the reason why, in the Benelux, large and small printers and pre-press houses choose to integrate CMYK Optimiser in their pre-press and pre-print workflow systems." Italian distributor, Col.net is said to be having success with Alwan's systems in all segments of the printing industry, from newspapers, commercial printers large and small operations to gravure, offset and web-offset shops, for instance.

Roberto Galbado, a director at Col.net, explained: "We're having great success with Alwan technology with most of Italy's major newspapers and amongst the chief reasons is ease of integration.

There's no print ink on paper device or system that Alwan can not fit with perfectly." Alwan Colour Expertise said that one of Col.net's achievements was the implementation of Alwan CMYK Optimiser by Mondadori Printing, which is claimed to be one of the largest publishers in Europe.

Alwan's software is said to have proved itself in ensuring print quality for the Pirelli Calendar book.

Mondadori depended on CMYK Optimiser to handle the colour management on the 639-page compilation of the annual Pirelli Calendars.

The publication was offset printed with a very high print run and contained colour and mono images.

Elie Khoury explained: "With 2008 being a Drupa year, our expectations are high that we'll continue our sales momentum and we are confident in doing even better this year.".

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