Why commercial printers need digital solutions – SkySat MD
Mr Izzat Debs is the Managing Director of Skysat Technologies, the sole distributors of Konica Minolta brands in Nigeria. In this interview, he provides insight into the digital printing solutions offered by the company and how the brands are helping to revolutionise printing in Nigeria. He also speaks on the fourth exhibition of the company coming up this week in Abuja.
Can you give an insight into Sky Sat Operations in Nigeria?
We are the sole distributors for Konica Minolta and Brother brand for Nigeria and Ghana. We have been in operation since 2005 as Sky Sat but, of course, Konika Minolta has been in existence for over 150 years and present in over 70 countries. They have distributors all over the world. It is among the top five companies in the world when it comes to digital printing machines, equipment and digital process, multi-function peripheral. We have been in the business for many years and Konika Minolta is an excellent brand when it comes to commercial printing. There are many different applications that you can use these machines for. They can be used for commercial printing, if you go to the commercial print market in Somolu, Lagos, UTC, in Abuja, or any of the commercial print markets in Kaduna or Kano or anywhere, you would see many of our machines used. They use it as direct imaging printing. Our machines are also used by offices and corporate organisations. We have big customers like Lafarge, British and American Tobacco and many government organisations like Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). We have over 900 customers spread all over Nigeria that are use our machines satisfactorily. It is not only the product which is important, it is the after-sale-service that we provide. We have nearly 50 technicians that are available nationwide in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja and Kano.
Does it mean that most of your customers are corporate organisation?
No. As I told you, we have a lot of commercial printers in the market. The commercial printers, businessmen who want to invest, spend about a million naira if they want to open a small print shop. So they buy our machines, then, we have corporate organisations which use our machines to facilitate the document management of their business. It is not only the machines, there are also software that are associated with the machines which help in the document management process whenever you are using these machines and this is why we are having the forthcoming exhibition to display the different software.
What are the benefits of these direct imaging machines over the traditional machines, like the off-set printing?
The problem with off -set is that when you want to do the plates, there is a minimum quantity you have to produce for it to be worthwhile. Once you design a plate, for business card, for example, there is a minimum quantity that you have to produce for this business card. It runs to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. So it is not worth it. For example, if you want to buy small quantity of print or if you have a magazine that you want to launch, and you just want to launch 100 copies, if you go to an off-set printer, he would tell you that it is not profitable for him to produce for you only 100 magazines, except you want to produce thousand or 10, 000 copies. So you would be discouraged because it would cost you too much if you are a magazine producer and you want to produce small quantity. So the advantage of digital machines is that the cost of producing one business card is the same as the cost of producing 10,000 or 50, 000 in offset. You can produce any quantity you want at the same cost. If somebody wants to print millions of copies, then, he should not go digital print because it is more worthwhile to use off-set printing. So, digital printing is ideal for small commercial print shops or even big off-set presses that want to produce smaller quantity for their customers. The quality is fantastic and colour is excellent. You have a ready-made product on our machines. On these bigger machines, you can do everything such as stitching, bouncing, perfect binding, it has all the finishing equipment, depending on what you want. If you want to buy the printer only, you can do so. And these machines can print up to 70 copies per minute, it can go up to 1,000. There are smaller machines which print 20, 25 and 50 copies per minutes. Usually, commercial print shops start with smaller machines. We have seen a lot of successes in the market of these machines.