Centrum Printing is moving to expand beyond its commercial print standing into packaging and point of sale after purchasing a KBA Rapida 162a six-colour press – the largest single press investment in the company’s history.
According to KBA Australia, the deal was sealed at PacPrint 2013 in Melbourne last month, and it is expected the new press will be installed and commissioned at Centrum Printing in Sydney later this year.
- Dave Lewis, KBA Australasia (3rd left) and Percy Vij, Centrum (5th left), seal the deal. Also pictured: Kay Halboth, KBA (far left), and Graham Harris, KBA Australasia (2nd left) as well as Linda Vij and Sandra Mascaro of Centrum (far right).
According to Percy Vij, managing director of Centrum, the move to take on the new Rapida will play a central role in the company’s push into packaging and point of sale (POS).
“We are a general commercial printer at the moment but we see opportunities in niche markets, such as packaging and point of sale,” says Vij. “The new KBA Rapida 162a will enable us to enter these markets. We will also be setting up a trade print service to enable other printers to serve that market.”
For Sandra Mascaro, Centrum general manager, the new press addition will enable the company to fill a larger and more diverse range of orders that are already beginning trickle through from customers.
“We already have promises of several million dollars’ worth of packaging work from existing clients and believe that as one of the few printers in the country with this size of press there will be plenty of work out there,” says Mascaro.
Dave Lewis, general manager of KBA Australasia says: “This is a huge leap forward that Centrum have taken and we are pleased that they have chosen KBA as their new press partner. We are sure that this Rapida will be a great success for Centrum Printing”
Centrum’s purchase of the Rapida 162a – which will join the print company’s two existing medium-format presses in Sydney – enables KBA to count itself among only two companies to have sealed deals to sell offset presses during the PacPrint trade show.
At the show, Cyber sold both of the Ryobi offset presses it had on display at its stand, with Trent Nankervis of CMYKhub striking a deal with Cyber’s Bernard Cheong for its Ryobi 928 eight-colour A1 perfector machine on the second last day of the show.