ANP Jakarta - a formula worth repeating (with gallery)

Sep 20, 2017 at 07:00 am by Staff


Two days which included a plant visit, technical sessions and networking raised questions but left delegates at this year's ANP conference in little doubt about one thing: They should do it again next year.

The seventh annual ASEAN Newspaper Printers conference in Jakarta attracted a record 204 attendees and the highest-ever number of vendor partners, among them WAN-Ifra, which organised a breakout tutorial session for its International Newspaper Color Quality Club.

And at a final 'soul-searching' session this morning, most delegates said they would like the event to continue with its current annual format, providing committee members with a list of possible venues for 2018.

The 'Wow in Print' theme embraced its subject with "wisdom and wonder" addressing the current challenges of the industry as much as its opportunities.

Hari Susanto, and later Setiawan Y.S. of plant tour host Kompas Gramedia shared the company's upbeat approach, telling and showing how it was coping with idle press time at its eight Indonesian printing plants by entering new markets including book printing.

"Survival is not enough - it will make us the last man standing," said Susanto.

Transformation of the publishing business established by Jakob Oetama and P. K. Ojong has seen the development of a massive office tower - adjoining its city production plant - where ANP guests were entertained under a massive laser-cut image of the founders. The schoolbook printing theme was also reprised by Ignatius 'Ditto' Adriyanta Wibawa with a graphic presentation evoking the "flight of the Phoenix".

Much of the first day's programme was devoted to vendor partners with Fujifilm's Mitsuhiro Imaizumi selling the environmental benefits of his company's plates with a presentation devoted to water quality, and - from Kodak client the Korea Chosun Daily - Won-Seok Choi talking about ink savings achieved with stochastic screening. Fujifilm's John Thye talked about press chemicals in the context of "the significance of the insignificant", while DIC Australia's Steve Packham turned not only to what you see, but what you think you see... and maybe don't.

Earlier, Ferag's Marcel Binder talked print finishing and added-value options, a theme ProtecMedia's Pedro Madrid touched on in a discussion of circulation and logistics management systems, including real-time GPS tracking of deliveries. "The job's not finished when the journalist writes the story," he said.

From two digital newspaper printing vendors there was a discussion of the opportunity to tailor a newspaper: Nick Price of HP Pagewide Industrial said advertising revenue would increase "exponentially" with the application of the inkjet technology to reader-targetted content and editions.

Kodak had brought French regional newspaper publisher Jean-Pierre Vittu de Kerraoul to the conference - en route for customer meetings in Australia - to tell first hand how Sogemedia was reinventing newspaper publishing with hyper-localisation and personalisation, "regaining profitability" in the process. More on this later.

Johnny Tan from Singapore Press Holdings had a horror story of a press-disabling failed bearing to tell, and explained how the publisher had worked with KBA to predict failure, developing systems to cut the replacement time from eight days to one, while Best Colour's Kyaw Thu provided a perspective on printing and publishing in Myanmar, and Thanh Nien Vietnam's Nguyan Manh Huy explained that the introduction of standardised production had addressed colour quality complaints from advertisers.

The ANP conference committee achieved all this and more with presentations in English - and one speaker's lapse into his Indonesian tongue - turned around by two translators, and a mass of explanation and support from organisers and vendor partners outside the hall. No mean feat.

Voting that the conference's role was too important to be deferred to only every two years, delegates provided a list of possible venues - including Singapore, Phuket, Kuala Lumpur and Yangon - and vowed to be back. We'll hope to join them, and promise more reports to follow.

Peter Coleman

On our homepage: ProtecMedia's Pedro Madrid discusses delivery logistics following an installation at New Straits Times Press

Below: The ANP2017 board and committee with Hari Susanto,production general manager of local host Gramedia Printing and Mitsuhiro Imaizumi of sponsor Fujifilm

Sections: Print business

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