New Printing Plants (04.2009)

7/2009

Hübler, Prof. Arved et al.

The newspaper market in most western countries is saturated, with future options focused mainly on competition with the Internet. In other parts of the world, there is healthy growth, for example, in India, where 99 million newspaper copies are sold daily and the numbers are increasing. As their economy has grown and their purchasing power increased, so has the need for information. The Internet is a partial solution and newspapers are responding too. New product concepts, higher quantities and quality are challenging newspaper printing houses. Printing house need to be flexible and able to adapt their capacities, which usually requires rather high investment costs and a long-term ROI. Thus, there is a high risk of unprofitable investments and high overheads. To ensure the necessary production capacity, different types of new printing plants are being planned and built in many places to provide distributed production capacities. The different print volumes and technological strategies mean there is no standard process for the establishment of new printing plants. Each situation leads to several alternatives. Nevertheless, standardised planning concepts are needed that are responsive to upcoming technologies and the latest scientific research. The report aims at gathering the wealth of experience of individual newspaper printing houses, presenting a standardised and structured approach to establishing new newspaper printing plants and providing guidelines and checklists for this and future projects.