A third Prosper 6000 inkjet press is on its way to Jersey for installation at KP Services and to be printing the UK’s national papers in the new year.
The press will be joined by a further Hunkeler line and will meet demand for national newspapers for Guernsey, particularly on pagination-heavy Friday nights. The boat service to ship printed papers in a dedicated container has been tested. However, until papers can be delivered every day from one island to the other, live distribution is being put on hold.
The additional press will also provide further resilience and back up for the two machines that are in place. It will be installed in an adjacent building on the same industrial estate close to St Helier. The company has decided to add mechanical stackers to catch printed and folded newspapers from what will now be six Hunkeler finishing lines.
The KP Services factory was opened in May in a ceremony marked by the absence of key Kodak and national newspaper executives who had not been able to travel to Jersey because fog had closed the airport. It is this weather phenomenon that persuaded publisher Guiton Group to partner with KP Services in the new venture.
The summer has been spent bedding in the machines and workflows, overcoming the occasional technical glitch and mis communication. Now Jack Knadjianwho had been persuaded out of retirement to become managing director of the operation is stepping down. Bill Patterson moves from the Highland Newspapers to take charge.
The technology is now fully established and at 150 million A4 pages a month the plant has become the busiest Prosper installation anywhere in the world according to Philip Cullimore. “The significant increase in pagination on a Friday night has proved we need a third press,” he says.
The increased capacity will also allow the company to take on commercial work and begin looking for this. The need to ensure that daily newspaper production is absolutely reliable has slowed Knadjian’s plans to offer a digital print trade service or to find other outside work.
He told a newspaper conference in Vienna that the full potential for digital printing in terms of personalised advertising and micro editions remains untapped. “It is still early days,” says Cullimore. He adds that Kodak has identified 90 islands and other locations where distributed printing using inkjet makes commercial sense. “It is a brilliant application if you can get the economics right for newspapers. This has been a show case for what can be achieved,” he adds. “KP Services has never not delivered newspapers, while there were 20 days in June where newspapers could not be delivered by air.”
The experience will also reassure investors that are looking at taking on Kodak’s Prosper inkjet arm. Due diligence is underway, though nobody has stepped forward as the potential purchaser.
KP Services will install a third Prosper 6000 line in the new year in order to meet demand for heavy pagination weekend papers on a Friday night and to ensure that papers can be shipped from Jersey to Guernsey in the quantities needed.
