Poligrafia 2009 will be opening its doors to visitors in Pozna?, Poland from 21st to 24th April. The Koenig & Bauer group (KBA) will be attending this biennial gathering of the printing trade in the accustomed manner with a joint stand (Hall 5, Stand 27) of its Polish and Czech subsidiaries KBA-Polska Sp. z o.o. from Warsaw and KBA-Grafitec s.r.o. from Dobruška.

One of the showpieces of the stand is to be a six-colour coater version of the KBA Rapida 75 press unveiled at drupa in Düsseldorf last year. The live production of high-quality posters and postcards on a variety of different substrates (plastic, paper, board) will enable visitors to experience for themselves the outstanding print quality offered to the B2 format class. A number of the jobs will be demonstrating matt-gloss effects based on inline finishing with drip-off coatings or the use of special metallic inks. The KBA Rapida 75 is engineered for speeds of up to 15,000 sph and a standard format of 53 x 75 cm. The list of equipment features includes both semi-automatic plate changing and automatic remote format settings. An optional extended format of 60.5 x 75 cm is no doubt an interesting alternative for packaging or label printers. The five-colour coater version of the KBA Rapida 75, in particular, has proved highly successful and KBA-Grafitec has already delivered 68 printing units to Polish users since the market launch. With this figure, KBA-Grafitec secured a market share of almost 40% and was in 2008 again able to defend its leading position on the Polish half-format market.

The KBA experts will naturally also be presenting comprehensive information to Poligrafia visitors on the similarly popular sheetfed offset presses for medium and large formats and on the company's commercial web and newspaper presses. 

KBA-Polska and KBA-Grafitec successful hand in hand

The subsidiary KBA-Polska, which was founded a little over two years ago, has in the meantime built up a very good reputation and was able to place 40 medium and large-format Rapida printing units with Polish users last year, among them also a number of new customers. In autumn 2008, for example, the first superlarge-format KBA Rapida 205 went into production at Impression Polska in Warsaw. KBA is similarly well represented in the newspaper sector, despite the reduced level of investment activity in the wake of the current economic crisis. The daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza is printed on KBA Colora press lines at three locations, while Edytor in Olsztyn prints the regional title Gazet? Olszty?sk? on a KBA Comet.