In our latest interview, GEW’s Managing Director, Robert Rae, talks to David Zwang of WhatTheyThink magazine. They discuss the current state of the narrow web market, GEW’s latest LED product offerings for the market, and GEW’s new process control technology, DoseGuard, which offers benefits to both OEMs and end users.
Read the article below, or click here to go to the video:
David Zwang (DZ): Hi, this is Dave Zwang with WhatTheyThink and with me is Robert Rae who is the Managing Director of GEW and it’s good to see you.
Robert Rae (RR): Good to see you again, David.
DZ: So, you know, it’s interesting, we’re here at Labelexpo and I’ve been running around different booths and halls for the last couple of days and you guys are everywhere. We see… and I love the purple because that’s what makes it easy to see you… but you’re in almost all the booths that we’ve been to. Business must be good.
RR: Yeah, it is. I mean it’s, you know, it’s been a tough market. Things have been up and down especially with some of the uncertainty and stuff in the US, around tariffs. So, things haven’t always been completely plain sailing, but yeah, we partner really closely with the machine manufacturers that you see in the narrow web market, and I think we have great products. We’ve got a great commercial offering, and we have the setup and support and service all over the world to be able to look after the machines for, you know, the full lifetime of the UV system. And that’s what really sets us apart. And I think that’s why, you know, a lot of the OEM machines that you see here use GEW.
DZ: Absolutely. And I know the last time we spoke was in Labelexpo in the US in Rosemont?
RR: Correct.
DZ: I think that was last year. And you were just introducing LED2.
RR: Yes.
DZ: How’s that been going? Uh, the reception good?
RR: Very good. Yeah. AeroLED2 we introduced at Labelexpo Americas (2024) and we started production of that product in January. So January 2025 was when production really ramped up of that. And now we are 100% running with our second generation of the AeroLED system. So the production’s completely stopped and the percentage of LED at GEW is now reached over 50%. So we are now 50% of the volume we make is LED. So that was more than 3,000 LED lamps last year that we sold and a huge proportion of those were AeroLED. I think 60, 70% is the AeroLED2 product. So we’re seeing really strong adoption in the market both on new OEM machines and you see that here. I mean there’s barely a mercury lamp running on the OEM machinery here.
DZ: Exactly.
RR: And also we see it from the end market, people upgrading machines.
DZ: And I know that, speaking about end market, I know that you also do retrofits and that’s a big part of your business.
RR: Correct. I mean that’s how you get started. You can’t, you know, Mark Andy and Gallus and Nilpeter and, you know, Bobst – many of these customers, they don’t start using GEW from nowhere, you know, they want to see that you’re proven and you understand it. So retrofit has always been a core business for GEW. Looking at old machines, giving them a new lease of life by upgrading now to LED. It’s a big part of our business, 30% or so of our business is looking at old machines and upgrading them. And we know all the machines in the market. So we’re able to, you know, make a really seamless, turnkey installation. So customers buy, it’s delivered, we walk away, you turn it on, and it runs, on any machine.
DZ: When I was walking around your booth, I noticed something called DoseGuard. What is that?
RR: DoseGuard is a new process control technology that we launched at Labelexpo Europe here this week and it’s essentially a scanning radiometer and that is a scanning UV monitor which scans under the lamp and looks at how much light is getting to the material. We can put it inline next to a UV system. And what it does is it then has a closed loop to make sure that you always have the same UV dose, the UV energy delivered to the material all the time. As the machine ramps up in speed, as it goes down in speed, as the lamps get old and the reflectors go down, then it always automatically adjusts the power of the lamps to compensate for that. So you know you’re always delivering the correct energy to the material.
We can do that inline but we can also, we have a lab unit version for offline, so that customers can take any GEW lamp they have in their factory, from the year 2000 onwards, they can take any GEW lamp, bring it over put it on this DoseGuard Lab Unit, measure the cassette and then, you know, for quality control, for process control they know the output of their cassettes, they know how much UV those cassettes are delivering, change the lamps at the right time to make sure you don’t get rejects… it’s a really valuable tool for customers.
DZ: Oh, I would imagine so. And I would think that OEMs especially on even, on well new installations, retrofits, whatever, that they can begin to look at that as part of their general process control system internally, because I mean they’re always doing that. They’re looking at all sorts of things now… are they adding that as a feed into their…?
RR: We’d love, we’d love them to, you know, any customer who has say two, three, three or more machines in their factory is a prime candidate for this product because there’s no way today, easily, to know how much UV is coming out of your lamps and with this you know. It’s a game changer and to have one unit, you know, when you have 5, 10 machines in the factory, it’s nothing. But the process control value that you add is enormous. So really we think it’s a great proposition and yeah, we’re just starting to talk to people this week about the product and its impact. So we’ll see how it goes.
DZ: Yeah.
RR: You can talk to me next year.
DZ: I will. No, I absolutely will. But it seems but from my perspective, it seems like a no-brainer to put something in and just build it into the system as you’re going, just building the system.
RR: I mean, it’s big. So putting it inline is not so easy always on narrow web machines because the unit itself is quite big, which is why we developed the offline unit. But for some really high-end applications like hotmelt glues or, you know, really situations where you need to know you’re curing within a process window. Not too little, not too much. Then we can put it inline on machines and do that closed loop.
DZ: Fascinating. Fascinating. Robert, it’s great seeing you man.
RR: Dave, it’s great to see you again. Thanks for interviewing me. DZ: Thank you.
Watch the interview now
To learn more about AeroLED2, go here.
To find out more about DoseGuard, go here.
The video can be found on the WhatTheyThink website, here.