Koenig & Bauer on target for full-year growth

The Würzburg-headquartered group, which celebrated its 200th anniversary this year and rebranded, posted a year-on-year sales increase for the nine months to 30 September 2017 of 2%, in the main relying on improved sheetfed growth of 7%, which follows on from a sharp rise in its sheetfed order intake in Q1.

The group, which last year broke its annual profits record, said it had taken a large step towards achieving its growth targets for full-year revenue and earnings of 1.25bn euros following a good third quarter, which had also seen order intake rise by 3.9% over the previous year's figure to 903.4m euros.

Meanwhile, the company has delivered the first order for the newly developed CorruJet digital corrugated sheetfed press to Bavaria-based corrugated packaging producer Hans Kolb Welpappe.

Crunching the numbers in Indian context, Aditya Surana of Indo Polygraph Machinery, the India representative of Koenig & Bauer said the company’s market share in sheetfed offset for packaging printing is 58% globally. “This year, our business will be better than last year,” he added.

Indo Polygraph has installed more than 50 printing units in present calendar year at various print production companies including Noida-based Dhingra Packaging; TCPL; Parksons Packaging; Mumbai-based Award Offset Printers & Packaging; York Packaging and Canpack.

“In the present scenario, our Japanese friends have done well and have major market shares. But in packaging printing, we are doing well. We are not at the top in number of printing presses installed, but we serve all packaging leaders,” Surana added.

In other segments, Koenig & Bauer’s revenues for the digital and web and special segments were both down, while overall net profit fell by 9.2% to 29.5m euros (2016:  32.5m euros) and pre-tax profits increased slightly to 35m euros. Earnings per share also dropped to 1.79 euros while order backlog remained flat at 613.2m euros.

In its digital and web segment, the group posted a loss similar to Q1, with revenues down 8.8% on the previous year's figure, from 113.2m euros to 124.1m euros, despite growth in its service business and digital printing presses. Unlike Q1, order intake fell, from 128.5m euros to 111.1m euros. Earnings before Interest and Tax (EBIT) fell to 3.6m euros.

Surana said newspaper printing is either stagnant or declining globally. “India is still growing. Now, we are representing Koenig & Bauer web printing presses as well and we can say that soon we will share some installation news,” he concluded.