Apex Press and Publishing in Oman has bought a single-width Goss Community SSC press to take control of quality and deadlines for its recently launched 'Muscat Daily'. The newspaper differs from many competitive titles in its broad appeal and total focus on local news. "Most of our competitors focus on the Asian sub-continent, often using news from the internet, but our approach is to cater to a reader profile that is essentially multicultural but with the limitation that, for us, local news is king," says chairman Saleh Zakwani. Apex has been operating since 1980 and employs 135 staff, publishing, not printing, a range of titles for the area. These include 'Muscat Daily', 'The Week', 'Alisbou'a', 'Business Today', 'Oman Today', 'Usrat Al Youm' and a local business directory. Print runs vary from 11,000-80,000 copies with frequencies from daily to monthly. With this complexity of titles, using contract printers has become an increasing problem as the company expands. "We have grown significantly over the past few years," says Mohana Prabhakar, chief executive and managing editor. "We are now suffering greatly from the constraints of not having our own press. "We also have many plans for the future, and owning a press is seen as a critical success factor." The new Community press will have four four-colour towers, one of which will be dedicated to heatset pages for high-quality advertising and cover sections. Rated at 35,000 copies per hour, the new press will be in peration June, initially printing the 'Muscat Daily' – which is published in English – and two weekly publications, The Week and Al Isbou'a. Prabhakar says the company did a lot of research to estimate the size of the market and the ROI we could expect on the press investment, "given our end goal for the highest sustained production quality". "We will slowly migrate more work onto the Community press as we grow in confidence with its operation - the press model has been around a long time, but the features are reassuringly sophisticated." Apex Press and Publishing is keen to expand on its current titles if the opportunity arises. Says Prabhakar, "We also intend to take on any commercial jobs that the market has to offer and will aggressively pursue the same."