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.
Discussion
By Warren Werbitt on Sep 06, 2012
I love it.
By Andrew Tribute on Sep 07, 2012
Glad you enjoyed it Frank. I was there in 2008 advising Masar Printing and its owner Arab Media Group. This is a very interesting company implementing technologically and I was there for them to advise on a possible entry in digital printing with inkjet and toner presses. I note that they had nothing in this area at present. One thing they were looking at was creating a hub for printing international newspapers for all the ex-pats working in the country and the whole of the UAE.
Frank you did identify a problem however, this being a lack of work going through the plant. This maybe is in the way they operate. The Masar plan is to mainly print for overseas companies and I feel they worked on the principle of build it and they will come. This is just like the rest of Dubai with its mass building programme. I note that there are no other buildings in the area. This is the area defined for the Print Production Zone where it was proposed that other printing companies and suppliers to the industry would be established. As you saw this has not happened much like other parts of Dubai where major building sites have almost been abandoned leaving building stopped. I was in Dubai in April this year and saw many places where no progress on building has happened since 2008.
Masar and Arab Media Group don't have, or possibly even understand the need for a major sales operation worldwide. The company is part of Arab Media Group and the concept was to build a multiple media operation to support Dubai's international companies. This hasn't happened.
By Hala Hatem on Sep 22, 2012
Interesting to see your comments.
2008 to 2009 were pretty bad in Dubai.. Things have however changed a lot since.
If you are back in town, it will be a pleasure to show you how we are running all our web and sheetfed presses 24hrs a day on jobs from the local as well as international Market.
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