S K Khurana
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Unlike mature markets, Indian newspaper industry continues marking remarkable growth, with increasing circulations of most of the dailies in the country due to various positive factors. Resultantly, newspaper publishing houses generally need to expand production capacities at their existing facilities apart from setting up new one to meet the greater demand created over the years. Also to make their advertisers happy and retain readers in the competitive phenomenon all over, several measures will have to adopt for adding value to the newspapers. For the purpose, to invest every time in new equipments and solutions does not prove economic to anyone. In such cases, there is another cost effective option to enhance efficiency and productivity, i.e. refurbishing, retrofitting or upgrading the existing equipments, especially web offset presses, becoming a routine in the newspaper industry worldwide and in India as well.
Almost all major newspaper printing machinery providers have been emphasizing on refurbishing, retrofitting or upgrading activities at the facilities of those customers who are not able to procure new presses but willing to invest to some extent and improve productivity and quality of their products. Nevertheless, this option can be effective at such newspaper production facilities where presses have strong metallurgy, high quality components and construction added with highly proven designs to make this possible.
Hence the investment made smartly over the years in equipping the facility with various machines becomes significant. Those newspaper publishing houses, who have installed machines with strong metallurgy and sophisticated designs, will be able not only to enhance the production capacity of the existing presses but also the efficiency to add value in printing their dailies. Many times it is observed that some newspaper publishers prefer to invest in economical presses compromising on features which enable easy upgradation if production requirements change in the future.
Presently, owing to the very nature of the newspaper industry, the rapid change is being realized affecting the infrastructure requirement. Technological advancements in all segments continue changing the face of newspaper industry. Due to emerging challenges from digital platforms of news dissemination, newspaper establishments can’t afford to go without those innovations, despite limitation to invest, and upgradation becomes obvious choice.
So it is the right time to be rather investment conscious and continue adopting such measures as long as it is serving the purpose. At the recently concluded WAN-IFRA Expo at Vienna, Austria also similar announcements were noticed.
Wishing you a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012, bringing many more opportunities to newspaper world!
