Finishing specialist Polar has begun to see Asia an increasingly important market, along similar lines to its partner Heidelberg with both companies establishing manufacturing in China.
Mr. Jürgen Freier, managing director for sales and service at Polar, sees opportunities for growth in asia and comments that the Asian market represents 30 percent of Polar’s global turnover. He says,“Today it is essential to have a strong, on the ground presence in China, which is the biggest market in the world. The most important focus for our Qingpu production facility is quality: the Polar brand’s reputation is built on quality. We ensure that key staff are trained at our plant in Germany and that all the components meet the same high standards of the German factory.”
Currently Polar’s Qingpu production plant produces a limited range of machines, primarily the Polar 115XC Plus and Polar 137XC Plus guillotines and a small range of peripheral handling equipment designed to reduce manual labour, lower overheads and increase productivity.
The company reports that, across Asia, it has a significant number of machines in operation representing what it calls around 40 percent of the quality market. Heidelberg offers the full range of Polar products to its customers from small format cutters through to highly automated large format Polar guillotines and in-line die cutting systems.
Freier says part of the company’s motivation to manufacture in China and to increase its presence in Asia, is to counter the flood of low quality, low price machines on the market that are compromising printing companies in their ability to produce quality goods. He says, “In China, there are a lot of cutters produced by local manufacturers and sold at very low cost. It is not until the accuracy of the cut sheet is checked that the differences in construction and quality are seen. Generally, these machines have a very short life and are often discarded in favour of a quality machine like the Polar. We offer spare parts for up to 25 years. That’s how confident we are of the robust construction and longevity of our machines.
“We know that the Asian market is very dynamic and adapting extremely fast. As a company, we observe very carefully the development of growing market segments such as short run digital and label production and consequently we have developed new machines and solutions to meet these demands. We are also aware that our customers are looking to maintain quality, and at the same time lower labour costs and speed up time to market, and we factor these objectives into our product development also.”
At drupa, Polar introduced a number of new releases including two new guillotines for the short run digital market: the Polar 56 and Polar 80 cutters. It also introduced a book trimmer, the BC 330, which can trim all three sides of a book using a single knife.
In the label production segment Polar has expertise with die cutting label systems. It offers a range of square cut and die cut label systems, including those of in-mould labels and the company produces an off-line die cutting machine, the DC-M, for smaller volumes of labels and the DC11, a complete inline system which takes printed sheets at one end and produces banded packs of labels at the other. Freier says, “Our die cutting label system, the DC 11, is now 50 percent more productive with the enhancements released at drupa. This will enable many customers to reduce production costs since the same quantity can be done in far less time.”
He concludes, “As labour costs in Asia increase, being able to reduce production time and increase capacity will become even more critical to profitability. Companies want to invest in quality products that will stand the test of time and enable them to meet the increasing demands of their own customers. As such we are confident that Asia will continue to be a high growth market for Polar well into the future”.
