The Phoenix Rises

As part of its centenary anniversary celebrations, Komori has produced a house note, The Phoenix 2023. This note celebrates and brings to life Komori’s concept of ‘Power to the Print – Technology that Empowers’.

A collaboration with Jura, Landqart and SICPA, the note combines classic, proven security printed security features with some of the latest technologies, and includes digital printing for the numbering the banknotes. This has allowed each banknote to be unique and to interact with mobile phones.

The main design feature on the front is the Phoenix, the legendary immortal bird that lives forever by rising from the ashes of its predecessor, along with an image of Mount Fuji. The back depicts the company’s production plant at Tsukuba, further images of the Phoenix, and cherry blossom.

The design uses 17 offset and five intaglio colours, including five ultra-violet (UV) colours. The note was produced in partnership with Landqart, whose Durasafe® substrate was used, SICPA for the inks, and Jura, which produces pre- press systems and software, and security features. The house note contains level 1, 2 and 3 security features.

Classic intaglio print features such as intaglio tactility, a latent image and a see-through were used alongside blind embossing, intaglio lines for the visually impaired and a portrait of Mr Komori, the company’s chairman, using different sized dots.

Offset litho printing was used for a range of UV designs and micro printing. It was also used for Jura’s Information Carrier Screen (ICS) and Smart Print Authentication Screen (SPAS), both of which enable the banknote to interact with smartphones.

Two of SICPA’S machine readable features were printed, SICPATALK® and NEOMAG®.

Finally, and unusually, the note uses digital inkjet printing for numbering the banknotes and linking origami images of phoenixes to the serial numbers, each note having unique numbers and images. One of the serial numbers is modulated in a unique wave shape. The Jura technology links to these digitally printed numbers and images.