There can hardly be another city which has over recent years experienced a boom to match that of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The print industry has also benefited from the unbridled growth, and has invested strongly in new machinery. One typical example is the company Color Lines with its KBA Rapida presses in half and medium formats. Initially founded purely as a prepress studio in 1994, Color Lines has purchased four sheetfed offset presses from KBA since 2003.

From prepress to full service
Soon after its founding, Color Lines had already established a good reputation among publishing houses, advertising agencies and industrial clients in the region with its uncompromising attention to quality. Modern equipment and the customer-oriented corporate philosophy CARE (Customers Are Really Everything) laid the foundations for constant expansion.

Proprietor Tarek Jawharji still remembers the early days: "Technological developments in the branch have been as fast as the shifts in customer demands. We quickly spotted the trends, however, and put our money into CTP technology and a PDF workflow at an early stage. Wanting to further strengthen our market position on the basis of quality and service, we later expanded our facilities to include also print and finishing, and can now offer customers an all-embracing portfolio."
 
Starting with a 74 Karat
A tip given by his brother, who was working at a print company in London at the time and drew his attention to the technical merits of the KBA sheetfed offset presses, marked the beginning of a close partnership with Koenig & Bauer.   Tarek Jawharji: "We started off with a 74 Karat, whose excellent print quality and fast makeready made it an ideal choice for the short-run work we were doing. With that compact and waterless digital offset press, we were able to promise fast turnarounds for our jobs of 1,000 to 2,000 copies."
 
"After two years, however, we had reached our capacity limits and needed to expand our production options. Within a relatively short time in 2005, we installed first a five-colour Rapida 74 and then a five-colour Rapida 105 universal, both in configurations with inline coating. The professional advice and service support from the KBA representative Giffin Graphics gave us absolute peace of mind. The Rapidas were the fastest presses on the market, and our printers appreciate the high reliability and ease of operation."

Three Rapidas in three years
"In the meantime, many of our orders have increased to between 20,000 and 40,000 copies. To still be able to offer our customers the same fast deliveries and quality, we purchased a second Rapida 105 universal with the same configuration as the first one in 2008. We can now split the bigger jobs and print parallel on both presses. There has also been no halt to the further development of automation and quality control on the Rapidas. We are today able to handle all the demands of the market."