A New Zealand company has become the first printer in Australasia to sign up for the high-speed Xeikon CX3 label press, formerly known as the Cheetah.
Xeikon announced the sale today in Sydney at the conclusion of its three-city Xeikon road show that also visited Auckland and Melbourne.
“The Kiwis got in first so it’s up to the Australians to catch up,” joked Belgium-based Filip Weymans, Xeikon’s Labels & Packaging director. “By the end of the day there will be one confirmed sale in New Zealand and the machine will go out later this year. But there certainly has been a lot of interest amongst Australian printers."
The road show, organized in conjunction with Port Melbourne-based Absolute Innovative Solutions, featured speakers from leading UK label company CS Labels, who took possession of a Cheetah in March 2015, as one of five ‘pilot sites.'
“The Cheetah is operating brilliantly and we’re excited by the improved workflow that allows us to run job after job after job and minimise human interaction,” said Simon Smith, CS Labels MD. Smith told local printers attending the event at the Rydges Parramatta that his West Midlands-based company, now running five digital presses including the Cheetah, had delivered a 25% growth year on year over the past several years.
The Cheetah, recently rebranded as the Xeikon CX3, will become commercially available after Labelexpo in Brussells in September.
“The majority of CX3 machines that we've sold already are headed to North America and Europe but we thought it made sense to come over to Australia and New Zealand because there’s a lot of potential here,” said Weymans. “We’ve had a very good response and have spoken to about 50 companies over the past few days. The NZ sale is first one we have confirmed but it’s up to the company itself to decide when they want to announce it.
“We don’t want to step into the marketing hype type of stuff about digital printing. Our intention is just to make people aware of what can be done and what can’t be done so that they can make a decision based on facts and figures. We’re not going around saying, if you’re not doing digital you’re going to be dead in a few years, because I think that’s just stupid. There will always be a compliment between digital and conventional and that makes a printer stronger. However, the CX3 really is a groundbreaking machine and it’s simply the fastest and most productive digital five-color narrow-web label press on the market in the top quality range.
“We rebranded the CX3 from its previous name Cheetah just two weeks ago for our launch but since then we’ve had a lot of people saying they had become quite attached to the previous name. So, who knows? Maybe the Cheetah might be headed back our way some time soon.”
