Blog

I still remember our first meeting with Benny back in November 2013. It was really intriguing how aligned our way to approach new territories is – based on true insight and taking a comprehensive approach to create value for our customers. As a leading true specialty chemicals company ALTANA is driven by innovation, it always has been, and so is Landa. We share the same values and have the same passion for excellence.

My wife has been nagging me to tidy up my study. You know the sort of thing, “You can’t expect the children to have to tidy it up when you die” and “Why do you want to keep those old things?” Of course she does not understand my attachment to some of the items which include my first mobile phone and pictures of my beloved Nottingham Forest Football Club, but she reserves most of her scorn for the boxes which my various Apple gadgets were packaged. “Why on earth do you want to keep boxes that you will never use again?”

Of all the different departments that I saw on my recent visit to Rehovot, the one that we have jointly established with our digital front end (DFE) supplier EFI caught my attention. Here teams of software engineers from Landa Digital Printing and EFI are integrating and developing one of the fastest and most powerful DFEs in the market, ready for the beta testing of our B1 (41 in. /1,050 mm) format Landa S10 Nanographic Printing™ Press. Some of the brightest brains in the software business are working on this challenge. For me personally it was good to see our announcement of the partnership starting to bear fruit.

As the world’s top soccer teams jet off to Brazil for the World Cup, I have been in Israel observing Landa’s team members at work close up. The similarities between the football players, coaches, staff and fans heading to Brazil on the one hand, and Benny Landa’s Nanographic Printing^® technology team and our customers on the other hand, are striking.

At exhibitions, conferences and customer meetings, I often get a request for a brochure on the Landa Nanographic Printing^® Presses. Perhaps being asked for a brochure is surprising in this digital age, but it is a reflection of a wider need for a printed product. Of course it would be easy to offer a PDF version for them to download or perhaps even on a memory stick, but customers expect me to let them have a something physical that they can handle, something tactile that they can see, touch, and feel. The content is important but the memento of the occasion is the really important part.

I have recently returned from my annual holiday to the beautiful west coast of Ireland and for the first time in a long time this year was very different. For a start there was not one drop of rain which must rate as a record for Mrs Mulvaney and me on an Irish holiday. However the biggest difference we saw was the resurgence of the Irish economy.

If I tell you that my wife only ever turns her phone on when she wants to send a text or make a call and then turns it off again, you will see how staggering her conversion to her Kindle reader has been. From flatly refusing to use one last year, she has now become one of their biggest advocates. She reckons that when we travel, her book consumption has gone up at the same rate as our suitcase weight (now lightened by the lack of printed material) has gone down.

Benny Landa’s next generation of Nanographic Printing^® presses are going to provide a great opportunity for printers to improve their profit margins, but they will only achieve it if they educate their sales and marketing teams in the ways to do it. Rather than competing in a price driven, commodity market, the sales and marketing team will need to focus their efforts to show how the new technology can increase sales and profits of their customers.