Komori and Landa Enter Partnership to Bring Digital Presses to Market

TOKYO/REHOVOT, ISRAEL—April 27, 2012—Komori Corp. and Landa Corp. have announced a global strategic partnership under which Landa will license Komori to manufacture and market digital printing presses for commercial and other printing markets using Landa’s Nanographic Printing process.

Landa Nanography is a new digital printing category employing water-based inks. It combines the versatility of digital with the qualities and speed of offset printing—at unmatched cost per page.

Yoshiharu Komori, Komori president, chairman and CEO, says, “As a specialist manufacturer of printing presses for many years, Komori Corp. provides printing systems that are capable of producing a wide range of printed goods for the commercial, packaging and currency printing markets. We see growing demand for variable data printing and personalization, especially for niche applications, which we are addressing with our already-announced DigitalOnDemand solutions.

“However, there is also ever-growing customer demand for shorter and shorter run lengths as well as very short turnaround times. To meet these commercial printing market needs, we have embraced Landa Nanographic Printing as a powerful solution for our next-generation sheetfed and webfed digital systems that use water-based inks. Moreover, this decision accords with Komori’s new policy of operating as a ‘Print Engineering Service Provider’ to meet various future-oriented demands from customers,” Komori added.

Benny Landa, Landa founder, chairman and CEO, commented, “We have enjoyed an intimate relationship with Komori, which is our supplier of paper handling platforms for our new Nanographic sheetfed presses. Komori was the first to be exposed to our technology and was the first to share our vision.

“I am therefore particularly delighted that Komori is the first-to-be-announced global strategic partner with whom we will be sharing this huge market opportunity. With its highly respected position in the printing industry and its broad market access, Komori is well placed to accelerate the worldwide adoption of Landa Nanographic Printing,” stated Landa.

Based on the strategic partnership, Landa will provide Komori with Nanographic Printing technology and Landa NanoInk, which are at the heart of the Nanographic Printing process. Comprised of pigment particles only tens of nanometers in size, these nano-pigments are extremely powerful absorbers of light and enable unprecedented image qualities. The printing technology is characterized by ultra-sharp dots of extremely high uniformity, high gloss fidelity and the broadest CMYK color gamut.

Landa Nanographic Printing employs ink ejectors to create the digital ink images that get applied to the printing stock in a process that can operate at extremely high speeds and creates images offering remarkable abrasion and scratch resistance. Most notably, it can print on any off-the-shelf substrate, from coated and uncoated paper stocks to recycled carton; from newsprint to plastic packaging films—all without requiring any kind of pre-treatment or special coating—and no post-drying.

Adding to this cost benefit is the fact that Nanographic images are only 500 nanometers thick—about half the thickness of offset images—enabling Landa NanoInk to produce the lowest cost-per-page digital images in the industry. All of this from a water-based, energy-efficient and eco-friendly process.

Landa added, “Komori’s decision to adopt Nanography for its next generation of digital presses is an important milestone in the march of this innovative technology and significantly broadens its potential to become the new industry standard for mainstream printing.”

About Komori
Tokyo-based Komori Corp., a premier manufacturer of sheetfed and web offset presses and banknote/security presses, provides world-class technology especially suited for today’s highly competitive printing marketplace. Delivering the highest level in print quality coupled with impressively fast makeready and JDF connectivity through open systems architecture, Komori presses help printers achieve higher productivity levels essential for increased margins and business growth.

About Landa
Landa Corp. was founded by Benny Landa in 2002 following the acquisition by Hewlett-Packard Company of Indigo, which Landa had founded 25 years earlier. Landa Corporation has four operating units: Landa Digital Printing, which develops Nanographic Printing systems for the commercial, packaging and publishing markets; Landa Labs, which develops alternative energy technology as well as nano-materials; Landa Ventures, which invests in promising technology companies; and Landa Fund, a philanthropic entity.

Source: Komori & Landa.