Heidelberg UK will be moving to a new prestigious site before the end of the year having sold its iconic Brentford site after a three-step bidding process involving more than 20 developers.
The move has been on the cards for some time, accelerating when at the end of last year it moved its warehouse operations to Mini Clipper, a third-party logistics company in Leighton Buzzard, and the last press in the showroom was shipped out to Fretwells.
Since then the only machine in the once humming showroom has been a refurbished press that has now been moved out.
The move gives the company the opportunity to rethink what it presents and how. UK managing director Ryan Miles says: “We want to find something close to the airport, so that office staff are not inconvenienced too much. The UK is one of the top ten markets for Heidelberg and Brentford has been such an iconic building, we are looking for a prestigious building that can serve as a hub for how we sell performance, support and uptime and as somewhere customers can come to be introduced to the whole package of what we offer. Customers are investing in Heidelberg as a ten-year relationship. We want a facility that can showcase that.”
There will be space for equipment, though not for the line up that would be available in the past. The Brentford showroom could house several presses along with guillotines and folders and other finishing equipment. In latter years this has included stitching from Muller Martini and digital presses as well as two sheetfed presses.
Today, especially with B1 machines, few presses are to a standard specification. “It is very hard to get a demonstration press right because so few are supplied to a standard configuration,” says Miles.
“In the year preceding Covid, two-thirds of press demonstrations for UK customers took place in Wiesloch. Almost all customers from the Midlands, the north, Scotland and Ireland found it easier to travel to Germany where they can see more machines, the R&D facilities and meet people with global responsibility.”
This changes how Heidelberg thinks about the message it wants to convey via the UK showroom. This will focus on the support, the people and the performance consultancy and other services that can be delivered. And while elements of this have been adopted by other parts of Heidelberg’s network, the UK will be the first that is able to implement the approach from the outset. According to Heidelberg CEO Rainer Hundsdörfer “the relocation will enable us to serve our customers in the UK even more efficiently in the future”.
Miles adds: “Whether we have a press or not is currently under consideration, Wiesloch is so close for demonstrations. We are looking for that perfect balance.”
The search for the new site has gathered pace in the last few weeks with location of prime importance. The timetable will be to move in at the start of December this year. At that point the site, opened officially in 1983, will be handed over to developers Fairview New Homes. The company has agreed to pay what Heidelberg calls a sum in the “mid-double-digit million euro range”, unofficially put at £43 million.
This is higher the sum that property consultants engaged by Heidelberg had expected, attributed to the fact that the site is one of the last in the area available for housing development. The process attracted 24 bidders who went though three rounds of bidding, each time increasing the competitive pressure.
“We believe we maximised the value we could have got,” says Miles. “The timing was correct.”
Miles is only the fourth managing director of Heidelberg UK since the building was opened following on from Wolfgang Gorth, George Clarke and Gerard Heanue. Their presence and the heritage that has been part of the building will, Miles hopes, become part of the the new UK head office.
