KBA hybrid coater press helps double label sales

Italian print firm Etitalia Industria Grafica has seen sales rise following the installation of a KBA Rapida 106 seven-colour hybrid coater press that came on stream at the beginning of this year.

Etitalia Industria Grafica in Fisciano is a printer of labels, folding cartons and flexible packaging.

The new KBA Rapida 106, and a 10-colour Flexotechnica N 10 G from Cerutti, which was installed at the same time, are in a 10,000 square metre (108,000 square foot) site, which was an EUR8million investment with room for future expansion.

And now, Etitalia Industria Grafica's owner and managing director, Beniamino Moriniello, is planning to double sales to around EUR10 million (USD13.6m) by the end of next year, and boost them by a further 20 per cent in 2011.

His workforce, which has increased from 29 people in 2008 to 40 today, will expand along with sales.

Moriniello said: 'We fired up our first KBA press shortly after the company was launched in 1999.

At that time our choice of a six-colour Rapida 105 with coater was influenced partly by our faith in Angelo de Santis, KBA's sales rep for southern Italy, and partly by the results of an exhaustive market analysis.

KBA was instrumental in making our business a success.

That is why, three years later, we installed another Rapida, this time a six-colour 105 with two coaters, interdeck dryer and hybrid capability.

He continued: 'We decided to expand from offset into flexo in 2005.

Installing a small eight-colour press gave us the production flexibility we needed to establish a second line of business.

We can now print plastic and aluminium sheets from a roll and thus offer customised flexible packaging as well as labels of all kinds.

Moriniello explained that while flexo is gaining ground in label and packaging printing, he had no qualms about expanding Etitalia Industria Grafica's offset capacities with the new Rapida 106 seven colour machine.

He wanted to have the best possible equipment for handling new offset projects.

And he added: 'Although commercial printing in Italy has been hit by the financial crisis, prospects in label and packaging printing are much brighter.

Our customers mainly come from the food-processing and beverages industry, where demand is relatively stable.

But our additional capacity won't start paying major dividends until the economy picks up again.

Commenting on the performance of the Rapida 106, Beniamino Moriniello said: 'Our new-generation B1 Rapida proves that KBA is way ahead of the competition, and offers a raft of advances over its predecessor.

With the exception of Drivetronic SPC dedicated cylinder drives we specified virtually every possible feature in the book.

We mainly print runs of between 50,000 and 500,000 sheets, so high-speed job changes are not a priority.

But where the press really cuts the mustard is during production runs, where it delivers the high output we need.

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