Give us this day our daily orders

When Jurgen Otto stood to address Heidelberg’s AGM a year ago he laid out a logical plan for the company’s growth. Since then war had broken out between the US and Iran destabilising world economies and pushing aside any thought of planned and logical paths to growth. Last year for example, he spoke of the deal to sell and support Polar equipment. This year he had to explain that Heidelberg was now to manufacture Polar’s equipment. Nor, a year ago, was production of the Speedmaster CX145 on the cards. That was supposed to have been built by Manroland Sheetfed at a cost that Heidelberg could not match. It still can’t but now has to find a way to build cost effectively a press that it says there is a demand for. Already this programme has been knocked back a year by circumstances beyond its control.

But just as the volatility is creating obstacles, it is providing opportunities too. Heidelberg’s engineering expertise and capacity has led to partnership deals for production of batteries, defence drones and development of an unmanned guided vehicle that Otto quipped “thinks that it’s a printing press”. This raises some interesting considerations for printers buying Heidelberg presses in future. These deals also provide a purpose of the Brandenberg factory that Heidelberg built as its investment in German unification.

The real answer to the volatility lies less in the drones and batteries as these are part of Heidelberg’s mid and long term future rather than the short term. It lies in reducing dependence on one off big ticket product sales and instead on regular annuity payments into its lifestyle division. Fewer printers due to market shrinkage and holding on to presses for longer damage new machine sales. Instead there is service and support, it means software as a service, it means lots of printing plates and hitching ink sales to placements of the new ink mixing units. This is regular income that accumulates over time, the bread and butter of business, not the jam everyday. It’s like the print business pitching for a big project and pinning everything on that rather than picking up smaller work from across the same customer’s operations every week of the year.