Zhejiang Daily News Group presses ready for Olympics

With the Olympic Games in Beijing days away, two KBA newspaper presses which rolled into action at Zhejiang Daily News Group in February and March have made up the biggest single press order that KBA has sent to China. One press is a two-tower single-width Comet – the 16th in China – and includes a dryer, while the eight-tower Commander is the country’s first. The 59-year-old company built a 40,000 m2 plant outside the city, at a cost of 328 million yuan ($49.27 million), to which existing US and Japanese-built presses were also moved. KBA says that although imports of newspaper presses slackened last year, China remains a major market for foreign technology, with two of the biggest media enterprises in the province, Zhejiang Daily and Hangzhou Daily, have invested exclusively in KBA technology in recent years. Both produce a broad spectrum of quality newspapers, frees and semicommercials. Established in 1968, Hino Offset is joint-venture between Asahi Shimbun and Toppan Printing. gx