Media and advertising company Printlink has embarked into thermal roll production and advertising for 150 supermarkets in the UAE through a purchase of a Mark Andy 2200 six-colour flexo press.
Despite lacking relevant experience, Printlink is now operating successfully in the sector and chasing new thermal roll clients, said Managing Director Mounir Yassin.
“This machine was installed in December last year,” he told Packaging MEA.
“We started the beta runs in March and now we are running the press on full production.”
Printlink is a media and advertising company offering a wide range of digital and large format printing services, he added.
“We had a contract with a huge hypermarket that had this huge requirement of thermal rolls,” he said.
“We have almost 150 hypermarkets in UAE for whom we do digital printing through our other digital signage arm. We do both indoor and outdoor signage digital print applications. So we decided to open Printlink to do production and advertisements of thermal rolls for these 150 hypermarkets.”
Printlink picked the Mark Andy 2200 for low waste, fast changeover, high value addition and high print quality, said Yassin.
“We didn’t have any background on production and machines involved in it. In January 2012 we started to research on the best machines for quality and durability in production,” he said.
“Besides selling a good press, Mark Andy’s regional distributors Flex Image Graphics (FIG) also gave us experience of flexography as we had little knowledge in this area… Mark Andy has three installations here in the UAE and a lot of installations worldwide and I found a lot of reviews about the machine and about the company.”
Pankaj Sehgal, FIG’s general manager for the Gulf Region, said the 2200 is “an ideal machine” for Printlink’s specific needs.
“They were looking for a very specific machine that can produce on thermal paper with a very specific requirement,” he said.
But Printlink may now move into other applications, said Yassin.
“As a long term future plan, definitely we want to expand,” he said.
“But for now our main business is advertising. So going onto other divisions and labels is not what we plan now… We may plan after a couple of years to go into labelling.”
The press is now running at 24/7 for almost 13 days each month, he said.
“From the 17th of every month until the 1st of the next month, the machine is occupied 100%… Our plan now is to add other hypermarkets and to run another batch of advertisements from mid- month to mid-month to fill the gap. We are targeting hypermarts like Geant or Lulu or Union Co-operative. This will give me 75% productivity.”
Sehgal said the installation is the first since he joined FIG.
“This has been a very important deal for us… Now during Labelexpo we are hoping to crack a couple of other deals. We are also strengthening our team and we are hiring two other people, one for sales and the other for customer support. We would like to start FIG ME,” he said.
“We were able to get back the market within a year, even though the competition like Gallus has been tough. Along with relationship we need to give after sales support. To give our customers confidence, we arrange for engineers to visit every three months… So we are trying to knock every door to show that we are here for a long term. This is to build the market base.”