OMET and Currie Group matching at PacPrint 2013

Every four years PacPrint showcases the latest and most innovative printing and graphic communications technologies to the public of the Southern Hemisphere.

The 2013 edition marked the first joint public appearance of OMET and Currie Group.

This year’s PacPrint edition was visited by 10,000 people and, though numbers show a decline with respect to 2009, the event created, as the organizers say “a constant buzz around the stands, not only generated by good numbers of visitors, but by the genuine interest and expectation shown by those people in what PacPrint exhibitors had to offer.”

The printing industry of Australia and New Zealand has entered a sustained path towards economic recovery (Source: Printers Post June Newsletter) and turned out to be one of the fastest growing sectors of the Australian economy during the month of March 2013 and expanded by 2.5 per cent in trend terms during the March 2013 quarter. When the exam is on the year on year performance, the printing industry grew by a strong 18.3 per cent during the year to March 2013. Despite these encouraging results, the rise does not involve yet capital equipment expenditures nor pre-tax profits and margins in the industry are still under considerable pressure.

With this data in mind, and with the certainty to offer winning solutions for the converters, the partnership between the Australian Currie Group and OMET came to mature this year.

Since April 2013 Currie Group became the OMET representative for Australia and New Zealand market place by acquiring Universal Print Partners (UPP). Fundamental to this acquisition was to ensure that the Currie Group retained the key staff that made UPP so successful in the past and continued the growth of the OMET products into the narrow and medium web flexo business in the Southern Hemisphere.
At Pac Print, the Currie Group booth was located centrally on the exhibition floor and aroused a lot of interest among visitors showcasing companies like HP Indigo, Advanced Vision Technologies (AVT), Horizon and, of course, the Italian OMET, in its 50th Anniversary since foundation this year.
Currie’s key clients and their guests of the show had two areas to explore the OMET technologies: on the booth of Currie Group, where the Australian and Italian sales teams were available for information or via a free shuttle bus to visit an OMET user, United Labels in the Melbourne area, to view live demos on one of the XFlex X4 presses.

Over 20 different companies answered the call and among them the words of praise were many.
During the period of the show, the most famous among OMET’s presses, the XFlex X6 was sold with the expectation that more opportunities be closed out in the coming weeks.

Both presses, XFlex X6 and XFlex X4, although different when it comes to the electronic on-board equipment, share the same fundamentals: fast start-up, reduced wastage and ease of management to support converters in reducing overall production costs whilst meeting stringent requirements such as just-in-time deliveries and close sequences of job changeovers.

Another advantage of XFlex machines is the flexible approach which reflects in the configuration of the press, the different materials it can handle and the variety of final applications it can achieve.

Claudio Piredda, OMET Export Manager for the area and Tim Stafford, now of the Currie Group, are excited with the continued success of OMET owed to the fantastic performance of the technology, coupled with the increased level of service support that Currie Group can now offer.
Currie Group is a highly regarded company already well positioned in the supply of technology to the labels and packaging industry. With premium brands already in their offering ranging from conventional UV inks, HP digital printing, and a range of vision inspection and converting technologies to compliment, many of Currie’s customers are already signalling interest in the OMET platforms with the aim that they too can profit from the profound experience OMET has in the field of multi-process and label & flexible packaging printing, whilst widening their knowledge and enlarging their market presence.