The not so unexpected news arrived this week: Manroland Sheetfed is to close for good with no more presses to be made after next month. The majority of staff, 660 from the 740 on site, will go at the end of May leaving a rump of 84 to handle any remaining business until the end of the year.
The administration at the factory has not affected the sales operations around the world, including Manroland GB which continues to operate as a service and engineering organisation. Managing director Daniel Godbold says: “This has always been a profitable business. We will carry on providing parts and service in a very professional way and we will grow the engineering side to bring greater flexibility for customers we already and to offer service and support to other printers that want it.”
The announced closure brings to an end the story of one of the foremost manufacturers of sheetfed litho presses, a story which dates back to 1871 and the Faber & Schleicher business.
Over the years the company introduced the first four-colour litho press (at Drupa 1951) and led or kept pace with technological developments. During the 1960s and 1970s, when Heidelberg was still dominated by letterpress machines or small format litho presses, the Roland Parva, Favorit and Rekord machines dominated the litho market. This was especially so in the UK where, under managing director Frank Werkmeister and sales director Eric Tanzer, UK agent Pershke Price Service Organisation was almost unchallengeable. The Roland Ultra and then the Roland 800 were the preferred choice of carton, book and map printers because of the large sheet size they could print. These machines were five cylinder designs with two inking units sharing a common impression cylinder. They were undated into the Roland 200, Roland 600 and Roland 800 as its VLF press.
But by then the world was turning to unit construction presses as faster, more versatile, offering better register (though not always), and with greater levels of automation which was just emerging as an issue. Manroland led with both RCI (remote controlled inking) and CCI (computer controlled inking) but had no answer on these machines to assisted or automatic plate changing for example.
The introduction of the Roland 700, a highly advanced unit construction press was to change this. It was launched at Drupa 1990 and the first presses were installed a couple of years later. Since then more than 30,000 B1 print units have been shipped. Given the level of electronics, use of fibre optic controls, the introduction of the transferter as a contactless means of replacing a transfer drum and a 15,000sph top speed, it is hardly surprising there were teething troubles.
Manroland acquired fellow German manufacturer Miller Johannisberg which introduced a smaller format unit press, to become the Roland 300, a perfecting system that the Roland 700 lacked, and experience of high speed sheet transfer. It also brought an additional factory in Geisenheim.
The line up was completed by the Roland 500, intended for carton work and the VLF Roland 900 to replace the Roland 800 press.
During the 1990s it struck a deal to rebadge the Xeikon digital press to fill a perceived gap while its sister company in Augsburg which produced web offset presses for heatset and newspaper printing, came up with the ideas to incorporate digital imaging in a printing press.
The good times lasted until after the millennium. In 2006 the parent company sold the printing press operation to the Allianz Capital Partners, which began the downward spiral of cost saving measures. The introduction of Direct Drive, decoupling a print unit from the drive mechanism and using servo motors was a key development, but could not stave off the crash to come. The press business was put into administration in 2011, resulting in the sale of the web press operations to German engineering group Possehl and the sheetfed business to Langley Holdings in what was a surprise move.
Its chairman Tony Langley stripped out extraneous costs in terms of people and factory space and devised a strategy of targeting the emerging economies, Brazil, Mexico and China in particular. Chinese printers wanted German engineering and Manroland Sheetfed was happy to focus sales and marketing efforts on this market. It worked at first. But in the years since Covid the company has failed to deliver to budget and losses have mounted.
The Chinese market, once an asset, has become a millstone. In the last couple of years, the company woke up to its traditional markets staging open house events in different parts of the world including at Potts (UK) to show off recent installations. There was simply not enough time left for this to work and the business was placed in administration at the beginning of March with Langley saying the situation called for drastic measures and that the business needed deep restructuring. In reality it needed a deep-pocketed white knight on a white steed able to rescue a somewhat tarnished damsel in distress.
Back in 2011 there had been speculation that a Chinese company might buy a high profile German business. It didn’t happen then and there was no interest this time around.
There has been interest in the spares and service business and something will happen if only because there will be revenue from support for many years to come. There is also interest in the IP and drawings that the business has, a sign perhaps that the press designs might reappear in a new guise. Chinese companies have not been averse to building lookalike machinery. It would not be the first time this has happened.
Whatever happens press manufacture in Offenbach will end. The vast site and its foundry is likely to remain with Langley Holdings and could suit its Pillar engines division which is growing rapidly, or plans for a datacentre. The mayor of Offenbach has blamed a “failure of the owner and management” saying that Langley would depend on the cooperation of the council for future projects on the site.
The union representatives at the works meeting on Monday have told German press that the blame lies in the over reliance on the Chinese market and that there had been little investment under Langley’s stewardship. There may be some justification in this, though Manroland Sheetfed has kept up with technology developments rather than leading the way with new iterations of the Roland 700 platform. Its recent emphasis has been that the machine is reliable, well engineered and affordable.
It is a far cry from the launch of the Roland 700 which at the time could fairly claim to be the most advanced press in the world. It was also “the last press design we will ever develop,” the executives at the time would say without realising how right they would be.
