KBA sees significant rise in sheetfed press orders

Thus, KBA is optimistic about its prospects for the full year, although it has a way to go to hit its 1 billion euro annual sales target.

These are the global figures. Considering the Indian market, where KBA offers its sheetfed and web offset solutions, the company seems to be doing rather well. Talking to PrintWeek India, Aditya Surana, managing director, Indo Polygraph Machinery, the Indian representative of KBA, said that it has been “one of the best years for KBA in India”.

The statistics speaks for itself. The company shipped six machines until May 2015, each of these being seven or above colours, fully loaded and highly configured. The company is also expecting least five more machines to come to India this year.

“In the last two years, we had a press in TCPL’s Haridwar plant, Silvassa plant and one at its Guwahati plant. One more press is coming at its Haridwar plant. Apart from this, we have machines at Parksons’ Rudrapur plant, Daman and Chakan plant and at ITC’s Chennai and Haridwar plants,” said Surana, adding that the requirements were for sheetfed special presses.

In India, KBA is scoring in the 28x40-inches format, which caters to the packaging sector. “The presses at these organised setups are as loaded as any European or American setups. These are real top-end with zero compromise in configuration,” Surana explained.

Claus Bolza-Schünemann, president and chief executive, KBA, credited this growth to greater transparency and market focus on the basis of clear targets expected from the new business units.

This is true. The group’s biggest business unit, sheetfed solutions, which was back in the black, turned around last year’s loss of 8.4 million euro to post EBIT (earning before interest and taxes) of 3.8 million euro on sales up 1.8% to 239 million euro, while sheetfed order intake jumped 40.3% to 368.1m euro on the back of increased demand from packaging printers.

As a result, the company has introduced “special measures” at its manufacturing facility in Radebeul, Germany. “Completing the raft of existing orders on time poses a substantial challenge,” the company said in a statement. “As demand remains strong in this segment, special measures have been introduced to increase production output.”

During this period, KBA also celebrated 50 years of its unit press production. The unit press design was launched by Planeta in 1965, and was a sensation in its day.

Meanwhile, the group made redundancy payments of 15m euro as part of its Fit@All restructuring programme, which will be completed this year. Headcount was reduced by 884 to 5,266.

Interim group sales overall were lower than last year at 426.9m euros (517.8m euros) and KBA made an EBIT loss of 8.3m euro (2014 profit: 3.8m euro). Bolza-Schünemann said “far more” than 50% of revenue would be generated in the second-half and the group continues to target 1 billion of sales and a 2% profit margin for the full year.

Back to India, Surana said the trend in India is now for seven-colour presses. “This is happening not only with the organised sectors but also with B-segments. A good example would be the third generation Nextgen Printers from Kolkata, who has got in a new seven-colour KBA,” he said. He also gave the example of another Kolkata firm, Exquisite Packaging, which too has invested in a 7+L fully loaded KBA UV Press.