PRINTING United Exhibitor Spotlight: Mark Milbourn, Executive VP of Sales and Service for Komori America

1. What will be some of the highlights of your PRINTING United booth?

We are excited that PRINTING United 2021 will be the first tradeshow where Komori America and MBO America will be together as one company. We see it as the perfect opportunity to showcase our portfolio of high-performing offset, digital print, and finishing solutions for commercial print and packaging. Our presentation of Komori technology will be unique, using a VR experience to showcase a successful press installation at one of our great customers, Solo Printing.

Mark Milbourn, Executive VP of sales and service, Komori America Corp.

2. What are you most looking forward to about attending one of the first printing/packaging industry events since the pandemic?

Without question it’s personal interaction that we’ve all been yearning for this past year and a half. Virtual meetings have become the norm, but that can’t replace the in-person exchange of a hand shake or to have engaging face-to-face conversations with our customers and prospects. It has been a very successful year for Komori and the PRINTING United 2021 venue will allow everyone to get a glimpse of Komori’s automated solutions and see firsthand why so many have selected Komori’s presses for their future.

3. What are some of your expectations for the packaging industry in the coming year?

The packaging segment continues to be the strongest segment that we serve regarding growth. Pressures from consumers and distributors continue to evolve the market. We might expect some portion of packaging to steer away from the value added approach and move towards efficiency and cost and standardization of sizes to maximize efficiencies of automated material handling systems as they serve the monster players in the online marketplace. Conversely, we might expect an uptick in the use of data and personalization in some areas trying to add extreme value, which could be coupled with short runs. We believe Komori is ready to serve the needs from both ends using advancements in our Lithrone GX offset series, and advancements in digital print from the Impremia IS29s inkjet series, and recently launched Impremia NS40 inkjet series.

Additionally, we believe that Smart Packaging will continue to gain demand. Komori’s Printed Electronics division will be able to add value to the process described further in section 4.

4. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Packaging continues to deal with stocks prone to curling, waving, sheet length variations, etc., forcing Komori to provide press designs with more forgiving stock handling packages. As you might expect, better stock handling on the press has increased performance implications throughout the process.

One of our most interesting topics in a developing stage, is that of Komori’s Printed Electronics business segment and its potential impact on the packaging marketplace and others. We will have Doug Schardt, USA product manager for the segment available to address the many questions of this evolving market. Able to print nano sized and macro sized electronic circuits, Printed Electronics will change the definition of smart packaging forever. Some Smart Packaging examples might be: auto tracking a package on its delivery route, including sensors indicating if the package has been exposed to extreme temperatures that may exceed the product's limitation (such as milk), or proactively announcing if the product is past its expiration date. An additional value can be that printed electronics can include power supplies letting us dream of packages that automatically light up in attractive ways, self-announce (via voice or display) sales promotions, or send messages to shoppers phones (if invited), etc. Smart Packaging applications are literally endless in their potential uses.