PROFILE

The history of Seiken Graphics begins about 70 years ago when the new president’s grandfather, Isamu Namita, decided to start a newspaper rotary press maintenance company in Kyushu, Japan.

At that time, there was a craving for a maintenance factory to enter Kyushu since the rotary presses that had passed through the war were just kept used. It was from this background that Isamu Namita, who worked at a newspaper printing machine manufacturer in Osaka before the war, was able to open a factory in Fukuoka, Kyushu with the support of the people concerned.

After the company was established in 1950, the main business was rotary press maintenance for newspaper companies in northern Kyushu, but as the company got on track, the range of work expanded and gradually established itself as an auxiliary equipment manufacturer for newspaper production. At that time, Seiken had established itself in the industry as a manufacturer of “lead plates casting machines” that makes lead printing plates, which was the second leading product after rotary presses.

In particular, in 1968, the technical tie-up with Wood, Inc., the world’s largest lead plates casting machine manufacturer at that time, surprised the industry, and the high-performance automatic lead plate casting machine called “Seiken Wood Supermatic” was domestically produced with that technology. The machine became our best-selling product and greatly contributed to the establishment of the management base. However, the strong performance of becoming the top manufacturer of lead plates casting machines did not last long. This is because printing with lead letterpress since Gutenberg, which became a major innovation in newspaper production, has changed to resin letterpress and metal planographic printing.

In order to survive the technological shift that shook the backbone, we carried out (1) streamline management, (2) commercialize equipment compatible with the new plate making system, (3) expand and strengthen mailroom system equipment, (4) remodel rotary presses, establish offset conversion technology, etc.

Since its founding, we have developed the variety of mailroom system such as newspaper carriers, conveyor systems, truck gate systems. In particular, we have continued to develop the carriers in sequence, including the first “spring type”, the second “BSG type”, and the third “CSG type”. And now, the CSG conveyor has also evolved to Mark III. As a result, it has been adopted by most newspaper companies all over Japan, and evaluated as  “the best carrier maker is Seiken”.

As mentioned above, the rotary press is a business that is the starting point of our company, focusing on maintenance, repair, and remodeling. In 1962, we developed and commercialized the first rotary letterpress, and started the business with the production of new rotary presses. After that, we seized the opportunity for the rotary press to make a major shift from the rotary letterpress to the offset press, and sought to enter the offset press field. At our company, we first established an offset conversion technology that converts a rotary letterpress into an offset press, remodeling domestic and overseas (Russia, Southeast Asia, South Korea, etc.) rotary presses, while making it compact in order to support the colorization of the industry. We have developed a lightweight satellite color offset press and received high praise.

Since then, we have also prepared a lightweight and compact offset press series to enhance the rotary press division. Especially in 2002, we developed the first 4×1 rotary press in Japan, “Seiken 65 offset rotary press”, which had a great impact on the industry. The reason why we launched the “Ecopress 4×1 machine” aiming opposite in spite of the progress of heavy-duty high-speed press in the recent years, is that we want to contribute to the industry with our own stance without imitating other companies. With the maturation of the newspaper industry, our company has been focusing on developing new fields for more than a decade. Those fields are energy fields such as wind power generation and tidal current power generation, system integration industry field that promotes effective use of robots. And challenges to the new field continue even now; food production-related equipment, environmental equipment and so on.