Xeikon highlights robustness in the face

highlights robustness in the face of crisis

We chat with Xeikon’s CEO, Benoit Chatelard, to cover the company’s restart in Asia in correlation with COVID-19, acceleration of Industry 4.0 and the new drupa launches. By Sha Jumari.

Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has put the global economy into a tailspin. While the crisis continues to impact supply chains all over the world, China has already begun shifting gears to get back to normal.

Xeikon CEO, Benoit Chatelard, echoed this observation: “What we see is a slow start from China. My people are able to go and visit customers. We have many activities in Singapore, and in Australia too. But Taiwan has really been the most active in the business, since the very beginning.”

Xeikon’s CEO, Benoit Chatelard

“We are growing in Asia. This year, the business is stunted from the COVID-19 pandemic. China closed quickly, followed by Singapore and some other Asian countries. We are just restarting, in fact, Taiwan has been very active,” Chatelard continued.

“Right now, we are experimenting our robustness as a company and our will to weather the storm. This is a good stress test for a company to see if Xeikon can pass this crisis without damage and have a very good business continuity,” said Chatelard.

In December last year, Xeikon announced the opening of the Innovation Centre in China at the Shanghai University of Printing. With the new facility, Xeikon now has two Innovation Centres in Asia to better serve the region. The first centre is

in Tokyo, Japan. As the COVID-19 lockdown has lifted in some cities in China, Chatelard confirmed that the Shanghai centre has already reopened.

“The centre is fully open and operational. We have our own infrastructure to watch demonstrations, to benchmark, and show proof of concept,” said Chatelard. “For local demonstrations, we invested in more people. But I would say at the beginning of the year we've not gotten the fruits of that because of the current situation. I’m confident that when we restart we'll have a good perspective in Asia.”

The pandemic has catalysed changes in the industry. Most businesses have had to restructure how they operate. Industry 4.0 and automation are trends which have been accelerated. Companies that used to be resistant or slow in its adoption has had to make quick decisions to adopt the technologies to stay productive.

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Xeikon SX30000

firstly due to the uncertainty of the business because of this crisis. You need to be more on-demand, so I think digital will give more flexibility for the future.”

“The other thing is, you’d see that we have to survive without your people being necessarily in the plant, so there's a lot of thought about Manufacturing 4.0,” Chatelard continued. “You could say that digital needs far less labour than conventional. So, right now is a simulation to seriously consider more on-demand technology, and more nonlabour technology.”

“With the grouping of jobs into a platform, you go digital to digital and eliminate the manual preparation of a plant. It’s far less labour intensive. When your labour workforce cannot be on site or you are far, digital gives you an edge. At this time I think many customers will probably have learnt that for future investment, I would cross it out even more than before digital than conventional. I think that would be what will happen,” said Chatelard.

The Possible New Future: Xeikon Café TV

Due to the current situation, open houses, relevant events and tradeshows are put on the back burner for now. The company’s signature Xeikon Café events, typically held at its Innovation Centres are also on hold. To mitigate the effects of not having personal face time and live demonstrations, Chatelard revealed the company will be launching Xeikon Café TV.

“Last month we invested into live streaming equipment in all our centres’ stations and learning how to make online demonstrations for customers,” Chatelard said. “We are now developing the methodology to make it more professional. In June, it will be even more interactive. For that you need to implement some smart technology to make it functional, efficient and not boring so you can retain the attention of an audience for a couple of hours.”

In the last week of April, Xeikon ran the first two Xeikon Café TV live streaming in the US, one for the label industry, the other for the graphic arts.

Personal interactions are still crucial, as Chatelard added that the company hopes to eventually participate in local trade shows or relevant ones by the end of the year, and kickstart Xeikon Cafés as soon as possible. Xeikon had organised a Café event in its Tokyo centre right before the lockdown, and the next step would be to do an edition in Shanghai.

“However, if we cannot plan for a Shanghai edition, we'll do it online. I think the technology will be used even more so to avoid traveling. As you know, going from North China to South China alone is an investment of time,” said Chatelard.

The technology can develop into a discussion platform with the customer: “It would be good to connect online in order to expand and progress the discussion. I think the crisis has helped us to learn and visualise how to have better connections with our customer. That's my vision.”

new products that meant to use the originally-planned drupa dates as an official launchpad. The company had stated that it will still launch as scheduled. The SX30000 digital press based on new Sirius technology will be launched in June 2020, while the new CX300 based on Cheetah 2.0 technology will launch in April 2020.

“With the two launches, we are introducing high end, high throughput, high speed products for both graphic arts and label. We will be bringing some new products to market prior to drupa in order to make the latest technology available to our customers. By drupa 2021, we expect to have even more innovation available to announce and exhibit so customers can be wellprepared for the recovery that is sure to come,” said Chatelard.

The Xeikon SX30000 press based on the new generation of dry toner technology for the graphic arts industry, Sirius. The single pass duplex machine that is able to run at a printing width of 508 mm on a broad range of substrates at 30 meters/minute, 404ppm on A4. It boasts an average speed increase of more than 50% throughout the range of 40-350 gsm versus the previous platform. for Asia. And in fact, we are already in proposal for both Taiwan and Japan,” said Chatelard.

The dramatic reduction of activities in graphic arts now due to COVID-19 has potential to delay the progress of the launch, though Chatelard remained optimistic: “I hope this will be resolved by drupa. We still have the intention to release sales by then. At this stage we should have already done much more external testing, but to balance it out we have done much more homework with internal testing.” CX300 is designed to achieve the highest possible OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and is even more productive than the Xeikon CX3 first generation of Cheetah presses. With Cheetah 2.0 technology, Xeikon focused on combining high production speeds with a high OEE, ultimately resulting in maximum sellable output.

On the other hand, the label industry is very active at this time, “because we serve the pharmaceutical and food industry. We are what we call an essential industry part of the supply chain, for supermarkets as an example,” said Chatelard.

Xeikon also released the new digital label press based on next-generation Cheetah 2.0 technology. The Xeikon “I believe the digitalization of digital printing for label is still relatively small compared to the rest of the world. This is because of the ratio of manpower in conventional; the costs is still low compared to Europe or the US. The volume of digital label activity in China is not that big at all, so for us it's a high growth potential. It’s very unique to China,” Chatelard concluded.

“Our focus has always been label industry for China mainland, more than graphic arts. What I observed is the trend of relatively entry level in the label industry,” said Chatelard.

“In digital printing, the heavier the paper, the lower the speed. This has been fixed very nicely. The machine can deliver two to three times more into the high grammage. The way it is positioned now, this is something that can only happen every five to seven years. We are now addressing a segment that is not existing for us,” said Chatelard.

Chatelard added that Xeikon’s graphic arts presses are experiencing a good demand in Asia driven by Japan’s need for high quality. There is also demand in China and Taiwan, driven by the need for books on demand and large volumes of direct mail.

“There was always this compromise: do you go a little bit lower quality with expensive investment inkjet, or do you go with the offset quality of Xeikon? With the throughput of this machine, we can now address the very high volume segment, so I think we have a high demand for the Xeikon SX30000