Canon opens new highly automated manufacturing plant to meet growing demand for water-based, polymer inks for its inkjet production presses

In response to the growing demand from the users of its high-volume inkjet production presses, Canon has opened a new state-of-the-art production facility for water-based, polymer inks at its site in Venlo, The Netherlands. With a focus on operational efficiency, the 1500 m² factory has been created from the shell of an existing building and fitted with the most up-to-date ink manufacturing equipment and levels of automation optimised to consistently deliver high-quality water-based, polymer CMYK inks and to minimise waste. At the same time, the plant has created new jobs, with its 30 employees being a mix of redeployed staff and new hires.

As announced last year, Canon was named market leader for continuous feed and sheet-fed inkjet heavy production printing segments in EMEA by market research companies Infosource and Keypoint Intelligence. The ColorStream, ProStream and varioPRINT iX-series inkjet presses have proved to be compelling investment options for commercial print customers and online printers thanks to their outstanding offset-like quality, highly reliable throughput and application flexibility. Due to the success of these presses, Canon has maintained its leadership in continuous feed inkjet and achieved the lead in sheet-fed inkjet heavy production. To support this increasing customer base and their ever-growing print volumes in applications such as high-quality promotional materials, transactional, direct mail, books, catalogues and magazines, Canon has scaled up its water-based, polymer ink production capacity by bringing the new plant onstream.

Rob Puts, Vice President Manufacturing and Logistics at Canon Production Printing, explains, “Our water-based, polymer inks were fully developed in-house and, as with all our in-house developed technologies, we piloted them here within our R&D facility. Once the inks had proved themselves in the market, as they clearly have, we invested in this new facility to meet the growing demand from existing customers as well as expected strong future demands. Dedicated to the production of water-based, polymer inks that can be used across our multiple inkjet production engines, the new, highly automated plant has been built to satisfy whatever level of growth our customers achieve.

“The factory enables us to offer our customers the best high-volume inkjet production machines on the market. And with the new plant, we’re confident supporting the growth of our customers’ business and of enabling them to produce the highest quality output.”