Graphic marks 65 years of operations
The Management and Staff of the Graphic Communications Group Limited last Friday cut a cake to celebrate the 65th anniversary of Ghana’s newspaper power house.
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Led by the Managing Director (MD), Mr Ken Ashigbey, the staff cut the three-tier cake to mark more than six decades of being an industry leader in the country.
The MD urged the workers to work hard to ensure that they left behind a stronger and profitable company for generations to come.
He said as the company diversified its business to include courier service and newsprint sales, it was imperative for all its staff to work hard to take the company to a new level.
Mr Ashigbey said the declining fortunes of the newspaper industry called for innovation.
Beginning
Graphic Communications Group Ltd (GCGL) was established in 1950 in the then Gold Coast by the Daily Mirror Group in the United Kingdom, with Cecil King Jnr as the first head of the company. Its original name was West African Graphic Company Limited. The company published its first newspaper, the Daily Graphic, On October 2, 1950, and followed it up in 1953 with the weekly Sunday Mirror, now called The Mirror.
The company later changed its name from West African Graphic Company Ltd to Ghana Graphic Company Ltd after the Gold Coast gained independence from Britain in 1957 and changed its name to Ghana.
By an Act of Parliament, the Government of Ghana acquired the company from its private owners in 1962. In 1971, the company became a statutory corporation through a legislative instrument – the Graphic Corporation Instrument, 1971, (LI 709). This was in compliance with the Statutory Corporations Act, 1964 (Act 232). The company, therefore, became known as Graphic Corporation.
Meeting market demands
In response to market demands, the company added Graphic Sports in 1985 and Graphic Showbiz in 1998 to its publications. In 1999, the company took advantage of the Statutory Corporations (Conversion to Companies) Act 1993, (Act 461), to change from a corporation to an autonomous private limited liability company under the Companies Code, 1963 (Act 179). This resulted in the autonomy of the company. Also, as part of the change, the company renamed itself the Graphic Communications Group Ltd and redefined its vision to become a multimedia organisation.
After becoming a limited liability, the company came up with four more publications: Junior Graphic (2000), Graphic Advertiser (2004), Graphic Nsempa (2007) and Graphic Business (2008). However, the company no longer publishes Graphic Advertiser and Graphic Nsempa.
Throughout this period, the company kept improving on its print quality for which reason it has bought a state-of-the-art press.
It started in 1950 with the letterpress printing technology, which was the printing technology available at the time.
In 1976, the company installed the first web offset colour printing machine in Ghana. This was the semi-automatic Harris web offset press manufactured in the USA. The company bought two production lines. One was a four-unit press and the other a two-unit. However, both could be set to work together if the company needed to print more pages at the same time.
Upgrades
Again, in 1995, Graphic led the newspaper industry in Ghana with an upgraded version of the web offset colour machine, the Heidelberg Harris press.
In 2011, the company again changed its printing machine for a KBA Comet press, which was (and it still is) the first of its kind in Ghana. Alongside the installation of this printing machine, the company switched from the printing technology that required the use of films to one that required no film, which is technically described as computer-to-plate (CTP).
Graphic Communications Group Ltd has one subsidiary company called G-Pak, which is into the commercial printing of books, packaging materials and other printing products.