Belgian joint venture Coldset Printing Partners chooses Cortina
Higher print quality – for the newspapers of tomorrow
With two new double-width Koenig & Bauer Cortina waterless offset presses and a comprehensive retrofit programme for its existing Commander installation, the Belgian newspaper printer Coldset Printing Partners, a subsidiary of the Mediahuis group, has invested massively in print. Over a period of two years – up to June 2019 – the print centre in Paal-Beringen was prepared to handle the challenges of newspaper printing in the coming decades.
The fast-growing Mediahuis group was formed in 2015 when the media houses Concentra and Corelio decided to merge. Besides regional newspapers such as Het Belang van Limburg and Gazet van Antwerpen, the Belgian newspapers Standaard and Nieuwsblad, the business daily NRC in the Netherlands, the regional title De Limburger, the Telegraaf Group and the Irish Independent all belong to the Mediahuis group.
The then independent media houses Concentra and Corelio originally decided to concentrate their printing activities in the joint venture Coldset Printing Partners (CPP) in 2010, as the first step of a joint project to establish what they described as the “printroom of the future”. The managing director of CPP is Paul Huybrechts. In an interview for Report, he explained the company’s commitment to print: “We believe strongly that many people are prepared to pay for quality journalism on paper and that we will thus still be printing newspapers for many years to come.”
Paul Huybrechts has a clear vision for the print-room of the future
The first plans for modernisation of the production structures at CPP were floated in 2013. Production for the Belgian market was to be handled by the print centre in Paal-Beringen, 60 km east of the capital Brussels. Four KBA Commander presses with three 4/2 towers and a folder each had already been installed there in 1999 – for the production of tabloid newspapers with up to 96 pages.
Nowadays, however, page counts of 80 and more are a thing of the past. The time was thus ripe for comprehensive restructuring of the print centre. Using the same floor space, and without major conversion work on the building, the idea was to accommodate more production lines. In combination with speed improvements, this would significantly increase the number of copies which could be printed.
The adjustable formers of the Cortina allow CPP to offer a diversity of newspaper formats
In 2017, at the end of the evaluation process, CPP commissioned Koenig & Bauer to perform a multi-phase retrofit on its Commander lines – parallel to a new investment. Paul Huybrechts: “We were and remain convinced that we need to achieve near-commercial quality if we want to maintain or – better still – further strengthen our position on the market.” Accordingly, the second element of the investment plan was to purchase two waterless offset presses of the Cortina series.
Huybrechts acknowledges the “good newspaper quality” of the Commander, which is now capable of speeds up to 40,000 revolutions/hr after the retrofit. But this is still not the level of performance which will secure a top spot in future competition. One classic asset of commercial production, namely format flexibility, was another important goal of the modernisation project. The two Cortina lines with their adjustable formers now allow for variable web widths. For the short-grain pages of tabloid products, that gives variability in the page height.
The modernisation of printing capacities in Paal-Beringen was realised without major conversion work on the building
The electrical and mechanical retrofit on the seven towers and three folders which were to be incorporated into the new configuration at Coldset Printing Partners began in April 2017. The only critical aspect from the perspective of the customer was the need to move one of the four Commander folders to the other end of the line. This was scheduled for a period of four weeks at the end of January/beginning of February 2018, during which time the print centre had to manage with just three lines. “Koenig & Bauer did a really good job,” says Paul Huybrechts approvingly. At the same time, the web paths on the Commander presses were reconfigured. Subsequently, the old Commanders could be replaced with the new Cortina lines. The first waterless press came on stream in autumn 2018, the second in May 2019. According to Paul Huybrechts, the commissioning “went really well.” Like a number of other Cortina users, for example in Freiburg or Düsseldorf, CPP has equipped one of the lines with a UV coating unit, which will permit a protective coating to be applied over larger areas of colour.
Gerd Bergmann
Questions:
Henning Düber
Background photo: CPP has invested in two waterless Koenig & Bauer Cortina presses, each with two 4/2 towers and a folder