Even without the dramatic circulation losses being experienced in North America, many newspapers in the Asia-Pacific are being impacted by the ‘sunset industry’ mindset which seems to be widespread globally (writes Peter Coleman).
And increasingly the focus turns towards ‘caring and sharing’: With less prospect of new print kit in the future, attention turns to effective maintenance and maximising the productivity of plant, perhaps by printing a competitor’s titles.
Happily for makers of press and other equipment, that’s not the picture everywhere: many Asian newspaper markets are growing strongly thanks to increased prosperity and literacy. In some nations, carrying a printed newspaper can be a badge of honour for hard-won literacy skills; in others greater industrialisation and urbanisation provides a bigger audience for publishers.
Figures presented by WAN-Ifra chief executive Christoph Riess point to dramatic circulation growth in China and India, as well as South East Asian markets such as Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The region accounts for two thirds of the newspapers sold worldwide and a quarter of newspaper advertising revenues.
But with increased access to online news sources, new print competition from publications such as commuter dailies, and declining readership and classified advertising revenues, he says the economics of news production and distribution have been radically altered.
What that means in individual terms varies enormously. In North America, newspapers made less attractive to readers and advertisers through their paucity of colour content are in a downward spiral because the profits needed to re-equip them have been channelled elsewhere. Outsourcing and shared production are seen as the only solutions to a situation in which publishers are uncertain whether their print editions will be around long enough to benefit from a new plant ROI as short as seven years.
A complete contrast is the highly-regionalised daily newspapers in Germany and other parts of Europe, where the benefits seen from automation and robotisation are prompting a flood of new press orders.
Double and triple-width presses equipped for quick edition changes are being installed, often shoe-horned into existing presshalls, and supported by automated platemaking and transport systems. Publishers have little doubt there that these sophisticated systems will pay for themselves through reduced waste and lower staff costs.
In South East Asia, every market is different, but there is consensus that colour capacity and copy costs are paramount. It’s become routine that Chinese sites buy state-of-the-art technology, but here and elsewhere in the region staff costs are a less significant factor, and expensive investments in press hardware need to deliver maximum productivity.
Press makers, peripherals and control specialists are being kept busy with upgrade projects elsewhere in the region.
manroland Asia has completed a major upgrade of the six Geoman presses at ‘Thairath Daily’ in Bangkok, while in Singapore, Goss International, Swiss controls specialist ABB and others are close to the end of a major reconfiguration and upgrade project involving four ten-unit Colorliner presses.
Frequently the issue is that while printing units may be good for many years of further use, control systems become obsolete, with parts hard to source. Controls specialists such as ABB, EAE and Harland Simon – plus engineering companies and press makers themselves – are getting increasingly adept at overseeing projects which may never have been envisaged when the presses were originally installed.
At the SÅdostschweiz plant in Haag, Switzerland, for instance, ABB?s Steve Kirk says second-hand Wifag OF7 satellite units have been stacked on top of each other “in a configuration that Wifag never foresaw”.
The company – which works with partners for mechanical work – has recently completed an innovative retrofit on Goss HT-70 presses at ‘El Mundo’ in Spain, which involved converting the press to footprint shaftless while retaining the existing DC motors. We’ve also had several reports of improved productivity from reelstand upgrades, most recently from Goss International.
Upgrade projects frequently bring a requirement that production cannot be compromised, as in the case of ‘Thairath Daily’ and at SolPrint in Subingen, Switzerland, where a complex series of commissioning phases ensured that the production capacity was always available from their manroland Colorman presses.
Giving a second life to old presses you might wish you were replacing is the tricky position in which press makers now find themselves more often: manroland sales executive vice president Peter Kuisle addressed the topic in a presentation at Publish Asia.
Upgrades not only extend a press’s lifetime, but can reduce downtime, changeover times and waste, while increasing quality and productivity.
At ‘Thairath Daily’, the complete overhaul of the presses involved replacement and retrofit of all press controls – with minimal interruption to its million-a-day production requirement – as well as a staff training programme over a two-year period.
Kuisle says the company is increasingly called upon to add to or reconfigure other makers’ equipment… as in the case of a project for the ‘Chicago Tribune’. Here existing Goss units and folders were relocated, and new manroland towers added, without increasing the press footprint.
What might be seen as minor improvements can also bring big savings: Kuisle cites analysis which showed a new drive concept on a four-tower double-width press might be expected to bring energy savings of eight to ten per cent, equivalent to 100,000 Euros over 15 years. Changing lock-ups to allow the use of conventional instead of metal-back blankets, automation of startup and dampening control automation, and installation of roller locks also each brought substantial savings, sometimes more than 750,000 Euros over 15 years.
In some cases, robotic automatic plate loading can be retrofitted, typically yielding a saving of one printer per press and often reducing the number of presses required… or of course, it can come with a new installation: At Druckhaus Ulm-Oberschwaben in Germany, four new presses are replacing seven older ones.
In Australia, the past decade has seen substantial investment in colour capacity to the extent that daily newspapers without 100 per cent back-to-back colour are the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps this is one reason why newspaper circulations have fared better than those in neighbouring New Zealand.
APN Australian Newspapers built five new print sites – one of which is now to close – in the middle of the previous decade, while Fairfax Media rationalised, upgraded, and rationalised again its regional sites in the same period.
News Limited is also coming to the end of a programme of re-equipment: A new KBA Comet being installed in Darwin this year follows similar equipment in Hobart and the Gold Coast, and the unofficial capital of north Queensland had its double-width manroland Geoman for the ‘Townsville Bulletin’ in operation at the end of last year.
Sites in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide have had recent press and mailroom upgrades, and the Chullora, NSW, project – from which the Townsville Geoman was separated –has already generated sufficient spare capacity to prompt speculation that it might print Fairfax’s Sydney editions as well.
News deputy national production director Wayne Bailey now presides over $830 million-worth of press equipment ($1.5 billion with buildings) including 30 presses, and says replacement of printing equipment will be “extremely difficult” in future.
“We need to focus on maintenance systems… on taking care of, rather than repairing our equipment. Maintenance is a serious part of our business and we need to give it the attention it deserves,” he told delegates at the SWUG Australia conference in March (see page 30).
A change of leadership at Fairfax sees the company’s focus on online publishing, along with cost reductions in its metropolitan print operations, and in this climate there seems little likelihood of its elderly (but upgraded) manroland Colorman presses being replaced with more flexible or automated equipment. This may change, but in the meantime News and Fairfax have confirmed that talks have taken place about sharing printing.
Fairfax is looking to save up to $15 million of printing and distribution costs in Australia and New Zealand, and a spokesman has been quoted saying this would bring “some changes to production” at its print site in Chullora, the Sydney suburb in which both News and Fairfax presses are located.
Domestic general printing magazine ‘Proprint’ was told by general manager of investor relations Frank Sufferini that there were “major issues to work through, such as which publisher would get first dibs on press time or what would happen if one newspaper missed its slot”.
In the same article, News director of corporate affairs Greg Baxter poses the question of whether it is possible to “have all of your printing capacity in one place instead of two adjacent buildings, and if so what would it cost?”
And he adds, “you would only do this if you thought you could do it really well without downgrading quality and also if it would deliver significant cost savings.”
There are precedents: In the UK, a giant News International site in north London prints the rival broadsheet ‘Daily Telegraph’ as well as its own papers, and even in Tasmania, News prints the Fairfax financial daily ‘Australian Financial Review’ despite News having moved most of its work away from Fairfax’s former Rural Press print sites.
Whether the two publishers could – or would want to – work together in the big cities, the talks are a constructive move towards the realisation that the newspaper business has changed… and in production terms, caring and sharing is the name of the game.
