Madurai, is the third largest city and the second largest municipal corporation in Tamil Nadu has five four-colour second-hand presses. This includes a Mitsubishi Diamond (20x30in) at Vinayaka and a Heidelberg SM 52, which has been procured by Olympic Prints who are setting up a new three-storey unit that will be inaugurated on 14 January. Its owner Raja, a marine engineer, is changing the game; and looking "to convert digital to offset by focussing on tag printing."
Raja oversees a busy service bureau in a bustling bylane of Madurai. The other important bureaus in Madurai are Dolphin and Beejay. The Olympic's numbers look healthy. 300 plates per day. Most of them catering to the Madurai, Karur, Trichy, Nagercoil and Virudhunagar markets. One intriguing factoid is: "60% of the plates that he outputs are for three-colour jobs".
Raja states: most printers prefer not to print black. He says, "This is the norm in these parts as a cost-cutting exercise." The other trivia about Olympics' nifty operations is: the plate operation is handled by women.
In addition to the new print unit, Olympics has a CTP system in Madurai. Olympic has a digital retail chain in Nagercoil, Theni, Salem in Tamil Nadu and a bigger centre in Vizag in Andhra Pradesh.
