Anton Hamm, executive vice president of MAN Roland Augsburg’s business unit newspaper production systems says publishers are searching for all kinds of possibilities to become more profitable in their core businesses and to enhance their existing product portfolio with new print or electronic media.
“We are continually hearing buzzwords such as new formats, convergence, podcasts, web-to-print and all kinds of new target groups in our discussions with newspapers endeavouring to leverage the most profit they can out of their operations.”
Executive vice president, Georg Riescher says one of the most innovative markets is the Middle East where the trend towards heatset/coldset-combined newspapers originated.
“These papers print superb quality and therefore attract high-quality advertising customers.”
He says MAN Roland is currently facing a dynamic market situation where there appears to be virtually no limit to the printing industry’s worldwide growth, despite the fact that some markets are stronger than others.
“All of us are feeling very strongly the effects of the globalisation. This is often considered a problem, but one should always bear in mind that globalisation is not a one-way street, but – as any challenge – bears a lot of opportunities as well, especially for a global player like MAN Roland.
“For example one can see very strong growth of between 15% and 30% in annual advertising spending, above all in newspapers, in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, the Middle East and India. Growth rates are much lower in regions like Africa and South America due to unstable economic and political conditions.”
Hamm adds that in cross-media campaigns, print continues to play the biggest role but “we are noticing a trend towards individualisation and segmentation in smallest target groups.”
Worldwide, they say that customers are searching for opportunities to automate and integrate their whole operation.
“Times are over when we could just install a press and leave the task of bringing the process steps together to our customers and there is still room for improvement in automated production technology.”
Some of the solutions MAN Roland is looking into include the next step to its printnet solution which will be the overall integration of several printing sites in different countries.
The company is also working towards the deletable printing form in newspaper presses.
Riescher says they are currently in discussion about the new technology with customers but it is not just simply a case of “screwing an imaging head into the press.
“What we are looking at are the applications our customers want to realise in the future. In-press imaging can be the best solution for short print runs, but do you want to change the image in the whole press, in one unit or for just one plate, such as when you update stock exchange ratings or sports results? These kinds of considerations play a big role when deciding how to integrate the process into the press.”
