The signing of the contracts for a KBA Rapida 142 for six colours plus coating on 19th November was a special milestone within the ongoing investment programme at the Midas Printing Group (Midas) in Hong Kong. The company already operates six medium-format Rapida 104 presses from KBA (four four-colour models, one five-colour version and one six-colour configuration with inline coating), but this was the first time that a large-format sheetfed offset press had been ordered. Midas was founded in 1990 and is today already one of the largest book producers and exporters in Asia. Even though all the previous Rapida offset presses have been put into production in the book-printing department, this business is nevertheless only one aspect of the company's activities. Midas is also firmly involved in general commercial and packaging printing. The Rapida 142 will be the first KBA press to be installed at the packaging facility in Yanzhou/China, and it has also been raised on a 420 mm plinth especially for packaging production. Further special features are the board handling equipment for substrates up to 600 g/m2, a lowerable non-stop roller frame for uninterrupted operation at the delivery and the combined densitometric/spectral colour measuring and control system KBA Densitronic S. The press is to be fitted with KBA's new shaftless feeder and with a coating tower incorporating a Harris & Bruno chamber blade system. Delivery is scheduled for the beginning of March. The decision to order also the latest new press from KBA was a consequence of the outstanding quality and performance of the Rapida presses already in production at Midas, backed up by KBA's market leadership in large-format sheetfed offset. "The performance of the press speaks for itself," said Managing Director Tin Lap Kwong, who was also able to visit German users of large-format Rapida presses during a visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Large-format sheetfed offset is playing an ever more important role in the Chinese printing industry. Whereas only a few isolated presses of the Rapida 142 series were delivered to China and Hong Kong in the past, the sales volume was boosted to 32 printing units in 2002. And contracts for a further 40 Rapida printing units in format 102 x 142 cm are already entered in the order books at the beginning of 2003.