Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) is India’s largest media company. It is growing in the print market as well, having built another printing plant in 2018 to improve coverage of the Greater Delhi area. BCCL again invested in Ferag conveyor and compensating stacker technology for the mailroom at this new location.
Media group Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) owns various TV and radio stations, newspaper publishers and internet companies. Company headquarters are in the country’s two largest cities, Delhi and Mumbai. The group publishes upwards of ten newspapers, including the Times of India – the world’s largest English-language broadsheet in terms of daily circulation – and the Economic Times, the country’s largest business newspaper and the second-largest of its kind in the world. All in all, Bennett Coleman prints more than 7.5 million newspaper copies a day at 42 locations that include 14 company-owned printing plants.
Additional printing site
Supplying a national daily is a logistical challenge in the world’s second most populous country: just the capital region around Delhi is home to around 45 million people. To better tap this market, an additional printing site went into operation last year.
Previously, the only BCCL printing site for the metropolitan region lay on its north-eastern periphery, in the Sahibabad Industrial Area of Ghaziabad. This plant has seen continuous expansion over the decades. The newly built Bennett Coleman Manesar printing plant is conveniently located on the other side of the region in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana. The Western Peripheral Expressway, which runs around the Delhi area, passes directly behind the printing site.
UTR and three MultiStacks
Bennett Coleman & Co. is among the major operators who collaborate with machine manufacturers to advance technologies. For a long time the Indian company was loyal to one printing press manufacturer, but for the Manesar printing plant a double-width, single-circumference machine (4/1) capable of up to 80,000 newspaper copies per hour was ordered from Japanese manufacturer TKS. Keeping pace with such speeds requires seriously high-performance technology in the mailroom.
So here, Bennett Coleman once more put its trust in Swiss company Ferag and equipped the printing plant with a proven combination of universal conveyor (UTR) and MultiStack high-performance compensating stackers (MTS). The bundle formation configuration at Bennett Coleman usually comprises two MTS machines, but in Manesar this has been extended by a third MultiStack that processes pre-programmed odd bundles.
A satisfied customer
The postpress processing lines began operating in September 2018. Management at Manesar is extremely satisfied with the installation and commissioning: everything went very well, they say. Particular praise went to the support from Ferag technicians, who worked all hours of the day and night to complete the project exactly on schedule.
In the meantime, a few months after commissioning, the printing plant is already working two shifts. In addition to the partial edition of the Times of India, BCCL in Manesar also produces the English-language insert Gurgaon Times and the NBT daily newspaper in Hindi.
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