Acoro A7 in Myanmar - need of school books supply - The start of a story

It was a cold, windy morning in January 2016 when we got a phone call from one of our respective dealer contacts in Hong Kong.

In Myanmar there were no investments in modern printing equipment since the 60’s, and this dealer was visiting Myanmar since 2012 in with the intention to open a new market.

There was an high demand in this fast growing country.  The production of schoolbooks was growing and outsourced outside the country since the printing houses in Myanmar didn’t have the right equipment to produce these schoolbooks. An importer of GSM cell phones decided to invest some money for the development of his country by investing  in a local print shop to produce schoolbooks.

First they bought a Heidelberg M600 web press for this print shop and they were trying to finish books on a single clamp Chinese made machine.

However, in December 2017 they got the contract for 4 million books, so they needed to get a good quality fast perfect binding line. In order to keep the budget reasonable they were going for a used perfect binding line, but also one of the latest generations to be competitive.

The Hong Kong dealer was asked to find a good, reliable machine and that is the reason he called us. He knows that Mekes Graphic Machinery has an high reputation in delivering high quality used graphic machines with full service, so we made a deal for a complete reconditioned Muller Martini Acoro A7 perfect binding line. In our workshop we cleaned and checked every single part – when there was any doubt about a part, we replaced or repaired this part.

After 2 months this Muller Martini Acoro A7 perfect binding line was ready for shipment. In May 2017 we sent two of our best engineers to Myanmar to install and to put the Muller Martini perfect binding line in production. A very hard job in 40 degrees with high humidity of almost 90%!

The local operators never saw a perfect binding line like this before and it took a lot of efforts to explain them that the Muller Martini perfect binding line was gathering automatically and no longer a table with 20 people was needed.

Also we came across all kind of issues like power peaks and suddenly power shut-off which a modern machine is not liking. After 3 weeks the first production started and since it was so new for the local operators, we decided to run only the gatherer and the binder and to take off the books by hand and to cut them on a guillotine. When the local operators were more familiar with the Muller Martin Acoro A7 perfect binding line, we also learned them to use the three-knife-trimmer and stacker.

End of September 2017 the first 4 million books were produced and delivered to the schools.  So our Muller Martini Acoro A7 perfect binding line has made an contribution to the development of this country.

Here you see the photo with the people of the print shop, the 2 engineers – who had a ready hard job and almost lost 10 kg. each, Ronald Mekes (our managing director) and Leon Lagrand (our sales manager)