Press supplier Koenig & Bauer has set a mid term target of €1.5 billion in annual sales as the company continues to shift away from commercial printing.
Its optimism is built on the growing sales of its Koenig & Bauer Flexotecnica division, uptake of the RotaJet in industrial segments and the opportunity presented by the shift to digital printing in cartons and corrugated packaging. In addition, KBA-NotaSys, its security press division is enjoying a strong run and can claim 90% market share in sales for 2018 while its digital can printing technology is starting to reach the market.
Later this year, the company plans to launch a new smaller packaging print machine at the major K packaging machinery show in Düsseldorf. This will be a surprise and “quite disruptive” to the market, says a spokesman.
For the 2018 financial year, sales were slightly ahead of 2017 at €1.23 billion (€1.22 billion) while Ebit rose to €87.4 million (€81.4 million), a marginal increase in margin. Orders at the end of the year reached €1.22 billion (€1.27 billion), with a backlog of €610.9 million (€606.2 million).
A shortage of components from third parties created a bottleneck for 2018, squeezing revenue in sheetfed presses to €647.4 million (€660.2 million) and depressed Ebit in the division to €36.5 million (€37.5 million).
The corporate aim is to achieve margins of 7-10% in the next five years with the €1.5 billion sales target, led by packaging presses. “With their structural and above average growth, the packaging printing markets offer particular appeal,” CEO Claus Bolza-Schünemann explains in the annual report. “In addition to our versatile packaging printing presses, our postures solutions such as cutters and folder gluers as well as our marking and coding systems are also benefitting from this boom.”
Packaging is growing at 10% a year led by e-commerce, urbanisation, single occupier households and stringent regulations. This can also be served through digital printing, which offers good opportunities provided what Koenig & Bauer can deliver is viable in terms of cost, productivity and quality. The Varijet hybrid carton press where the company is working with Durst, has just these aims. It will be shown for the first time at Drupa next year.
By Gareth Ward
Sales of the RotaJet are starting to fall into place with one machine destined for Tetrapak in the US to print drinks cartons and another two for decor printers. This typifies the new customers that Koenig & Bauer is aiming at: packaging companies and groups that want to handle their own waste reduction printing rather than newspaper and publication printers.
