This is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com. I’m here in Dubai, at one of the most modern printing companies I have ever seen. There’s half a million square feet of plant built in four years, opened in 2004; literally in the middle of the desert.

As you enter the plant, you come into a two-story atrium, and you see a picture of the Sheik. This is a government building owned by the Sheik of Dubai. It’s a beautiful entryway. To the right of it, which is very interesting, there’s an old platen letterpress Heidelberg windmill with an Arabic name tag on it so it would give you a reminder of the old days. I see that at a lot of plants in the Middle East, a lot of letterpress equipment leftover from the old days.

You enter the main pressroom and there you see the most unbelievable array of sheet fed presses, mostly Manroland, but many Heidelberg’s as well, but presses as far as the eye can see. You can see from the pictures here how far back it goes, almost all multi-color, of course, with coders, state-of-the-art as of 2004. Only one of them was running a job from what I could see. Very little paper were stacked up for jobs waiting to go in.

You then move from the sheet fed area to the roll fed area where you find presses from Manroland for the commercial side. There are dryers on them, they’re running coded stock. There was coded stock in the press, but the press wasn’t running. The plant is absolutely gorgeous in the way it’s built. You can see the control units here for the roll fed press. As you move forward, you start to see the bindery area for magazines and publications using coded stock, again, state-of-the-art in every way that you could possibly imagine.

As you move through the plant you start to come to other areas where you find newspaper presses, for instance, again, Manroland in most cases. There were of the Manroland presses, the Prepress Department, state-of-the-art, computer to plate, unbelievable control systems everywhere that you go. I was just amazed by it all. And the place was just immaculate. You could – your mother would say you can eat off the floor, I think you could eat off the floor here.

This is – we’re getting into another area here where you can see the newspaper presses here. They’re all backed up so that they could produce even if one were down they could get newspapers out. I guess that the newspaper marketplace is sort of declined at this time in Dubai at this stage of the game as they were telling me a lot of people were using i-Pads and Kindles and things like that.

The paper storage area, as far as the eye could see, rolls of paper there. These are some of the newspapers that they produced. Again, their volume was down, which is why the plant, when I was there, there was almost no operation going on although they say at night there’s more activity.

You look out the window and you see the desert because that’s really what’s around you. They’re trying to make this into a print city.

This is Frank Romano.