Despite the fact that Landa is still working to commercialise its Nanography presses, which will not ship until next year, the firm said it racked up orders worth more than €450m (£350m) at the show.
“We don’t disclose our agreements with customers, but needless to say that these are real orders (not letters of intent) with deposits,” stated chief executive Yishai Amir.
The firm declined to give a breakdown of which of its presses had proved most popular, but said it took orders for its B1-format S10 and S10P perfecting presses, and W10 web press.
While Landa has not disclosed pricing details, founder and chairman Benny Landa has previously said that the price of the presses would be comparable to the offset equivalent.
The firm started off using Kyocera heads but has since switch to Fujifilm Samba printheads, also used in Fujifilm’s own Jet Press and the Heidelberg Primefire 106.
It also appears likely that with such a huge order backlog Landa will accelerate its plans to ramp up its manufacturing capabilities in Israel. It has built a new ink plant to manufacture NanoInk and also has plans to consolidate its other operations onto one large campus, pending the successful roll-out of its products.
“We plan to start shipping presses in early 2017. We have scalable production facilities in Israel that can support the production and delivery of these presses,” Amir added.
At Drupa the firm announced a strategic collaboration with Quad/Graphics to take Nanography into publication printing, and a partnership with web-to-print giant Cimpress that could involve as many as 20 presses if the Landa tech meets Cimpress’s requirements during testing.
A host of high-profile beta sites were also announced, along with co-operations with Esko to use its Automation Engine for folding carton workflows, and with Kodak to integrate Prinergy for commercial print workflows.
Alongside working to achieve the necessary quality and reliability standards to make the Nanography presses ready for customer shipments, Landa Digital Printing also needs to decide how to proceed with its Nano Metallography product, following an “overwhelming” response to the technology at the show.
Amir said: “Our plans at Drupa were to showcase this new Nano-Metallography technology and collect more feedback on the potential of this technology for each of the relevant markets.
“The feedback and demand we got at Drupa were overwhelming and we now need to make decisions about the products roadmap and how we take these to market. We will share more information in due time.”
Nano-Metallography holds out the promise of replacing conventional foiling with tiny metallic nano flakes, resulting in a zero waste process.
Label and flexible packaging specialist Reflex Group is set to be Landa’s first UK customer, with a W10 web press. It also hopes to adopt Nano-Metallography as well.
