In this short video interview, WhatTheyTh!nk’s Senior Editor, David Zwang discusses GEW’s development with Robert Rae, GEW’s Managing Director for Sales.
Scroll down to read the transcript rather than watch the video.
Dave Zwang (DZ): Hi, this is Dave Zwang with WhatTheyThink!, and with me is Rob Rae, who is the Managing Director of Sales for GEW… nice to meet you Rob.
Robert Rae (RR): Nice to meet you too.
DZ: So, so tell me a little bit about GEW.
RR: Well, we’re one of the biggest, if not the biggest UV curing system provider in the world, and we make both mercury and LED curing systems for printing, coating and converting applications. We have a very heavy presence in the narrow web, labels and flexible packaging market, but we also sell systems into sheetfed offset, industrial systems, wood coating, and many other markets that require UV curing.
DZ: So you’re, I mean you’re covering that, that whole kind of print marketplace which could include digital, I assume?
RR: Digital, flexo, offset, screen… any of the different printing methods, digital being primarily UV inkjet, but yes, any of the different print methods where there’s a UV curable ink, especially acrylate chemistry mainly, UV curing is fairly ubiquitously used.
DZ: Sure, I know there’s a lot of changes in the industry in terms of the chemicals, as well as the processes because of sustainability, etc. etc. – what do you have to kind of bridge that, or do you have anything to bridge that at this point?
RR: Well absolutely, I mean the big trend in UV curing over the past three to five years certainly – it’s exploded – is the adoption of LED curing, so historically we were curing with mercury-based Arc lamps and today increasingly LED is adopted as a method, so the UV is produced by an LED diode instead of by a mercury lamp and that has huge advantages in terms of energy consumptions being 70% less, the installed power equirement of the system, you know, you can fit three presses now in the set space you used to fit two, if you fit in with LED.
And there’s process benefits too, often in some materials you can run faster, it puts less heat into substrates, so you can do more sensitive materials more easily, better registration, less maintenance on the systems, more consistent output over time, so no bulbs and reflectors to change and that means customers know when they print today and they print in three months, they’re getting the same quality output all the time, so it really has some process benefits, enormous sustainability benefits and that’s why its, really its adoption is increasingly taking off, and today it’s already 40, 45% of our volume now is moved to LED and with some of the new developments, you know, that we’re coming along with today…we’re launching AeroLED2 and LeoLED2, the successors to our previous AeroLED and LeoLED curing systems… AeroLED2 now has 30% more power than it did before, it’s as powerful as our old water-cooled system, and so what that means is, what we’ve seen, you know, you mentioned some of the changes happening in the industry, well certainly in Europe but also more broadly, there’s a tighter regulatory framework on inks and photoinitiators than there’s ever been, putting a lot of pressure on the ink suppliers and what that means is we’re seeing increasing requirement for more power in the UV system, especially in the LED systems, that’s what AeroLED2 basically addresses.
It’s significantly higher power than it was before, the same as water-cooled, so now customers can feel confident moving to air-cooled LED in pretty much all but the very most demanding print applications and we’ve also stretched it to 26 inches now, we didn’t previously have it there, which means for the midweb market for your, you know, pouch and shrink sleeve machines, that flexible packaging market… that can move to air-cooled LED, which saves chillers and reduces costs, so yes we’ve seen, you know, things are changing really fast in UV curing at the minute and sustainability is part of the agenda, but cost-saving and efficiency is one of the main reasons that we’re seeing adoption of LED.
DZ: So, I assume a big part of your business is OEM business, but is there aftermarket business?
RR: Absolutely… I mean, yes, OEM business is obviously key because, you know, machines need curing and, you know, a lot of the OEMs are our big customers but probably 30, maybe even 40% of our business is retrofitting old UV systems, so customers can renew or improve the output and efficiency of machines they already have in their pressroom, with relatively cost-effective upgrades which we do all around the world. But it’s here in the US especially, supported by our company GEW Incorporated which is based in Ohio.
The nice thing about GEW’s curing systems is our power supplies for the last 10 years have been ready for LED, so everything that we have shipped for the last 10 years is ready for LED, and that means that customers who have GEW curing systems, to move their press to LED, all they need to do is buy an LED cassette, actually unplug, slide it in and do a software update, so in less than an hour we can upgrade a machine to LED… so we say, you know, in your lunch break you can change this press over to LED, save 70% energy, and be running on new levels of process efficiency.
DZ: Absolutely amazing… Rob, nice meeting you!
RR: Nice to meet you too, thanks very much for stopping by.
DZ: Yes, thank you.
To learn more about AeroLED2, visit the product page now.
