Welcoming guests to the 2018 Awards Lunch in London, Koenig & Bauer’s UK Managing Director, Andrew Pang, said the UK market is one of the most responsive to automation and customisation for production efficiency purposes, and therefore a great launchpad for K&B’s new technology.
Sven Strzelczyk, Vice President of Sheet Fed Sales for Koenig & Bauer Group gave an overview of global performance, which shows a general slowdown in business, partly as a result of raw material shortages and partly for financial reasons. He said that currency fluctuations in some of the developing markets were also placing a downward pressure on demand. However, the Group enjoys a steady 26% share of all sheet fed presses sold globally and its 5,500 employees generated sales of €1.2 billion in 2017 across 10 production sites.
According to a recent Smithers PIRA forecast, packaging is predicted to grow worldwide by 4-6% in the five years between 2017 and 2021 and this trend has been reflected by Koenig & Bauer, which has seen sales of packaging presses grow from 25% in 2007 to 60% of its business in 2017. Away from presses, Strzelczyk mentioned the acquisition of Iberica (flat-bed die-cutters) in 2016, and the launch of the RDC 106 rotary die-cutter, capable of 17,000 sheets/hour, as significant additions to the Koenig & Bauer portfolio.
This year’s KBA Award Winner was Taylor Bloxham, the Leicestershire based group that also includes FastAnt, Mailbox, and Instore businesses as part of a print, fulfilment, e-Commerce, Direct Mail and POP one-stop-shop. Using a newly installed Rapida 106-6 +C, the company achieved production efficiency improvements of between 16% and 44% on three distinctly different jobs. The press was fitted with fully automatic plate-changing and wash-up, ErgoTronic.
Koenig & Bauer UK’s Andrew Pang (left) and Chris Scully (right) present Taylor Bloxham’s CEO Robert Lockwood with this year’s Award.
