Parkside Flexibles of Wakefield, UK, has opened its first overseas production facility in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The new facility was opened by Dato Mukriz Mahathir, Malaysia’s deputy minister of international trade and industry. Parkside believes its new manufacturing base will enable greater strategic alignment with its customers and will deliver further growth for the business whilst improving the supply chain to its Asian customer base.
According to sales and marketing director Chris Kozlik, the improvement to the supply chain for the company’s customers in the region will be significant. “Lead times will be a lot shorter, enabling our customers to reduce their stock levels. They will also benefit from a reduction in freight costs and in some instances import duty.”
In addition to providing state-of-the art laminating and coating technology, Parkside believes the time is right to bring high quality flexographic print to Asia. The second phase of the investment will see the new production unit equipped with a flexographic press to further enhance its product range in the region. The company has chosen to install exclusively flexographic printing machinery for its flexibility, speed-to-market and cost efficiency.
According to the company, Parkside’s strategy of continual improvement and innovation has enabled it to develop a range of innovative products for the tobacco industry, ranging from registered heat seal paper to its “lock ‘n’ peel” RYO pouch technology. At the same time, investment in the flexo process has narrowed the quality gap to traditional gravure printing. Parkside calls it “extreme flexo” and it allows delivery of more dots per inch to print vignettes and to produce sharper illustrations than ever before.(wmc)