AUGSBURG, Germany — With MAN Roland’s first calendar year of independence now complete, Chairman of the Executive Board Gerd Finkbeiner said the vendor remains poised for growth despite uncertainty in key markets such as the United States and United Kingdom.

“The company’s structural changes have led to growth opportunities for the company,” he said at a pre-drupa press conference. “We want and will be the benchmark for enterprise value creation. We are focused on value-added printing and are looking at projects and services that will provide growth opportunities for our customers and ourselves.”

MAN Roland executive board members, left to right, Paul Steidle,  Dr. Ingo Koch, Gerd Finkbeiner and Dr. Markus Rall, at firm’s Augsburg, Germany, headquarters.
 

In 2007, the first calendar year since the press vendor was spun off by MAN AG, Finkbeiner said the company posted revenues of $2.8 billion, down 6 percent from 2006 but only slightly below the target of $2.9 billion.

Of those sales, the company’s webfed press division contributed a little more than $1.4 billion, a 7 percent drop, although profits rose 9 percent.

 

 “Overall, the group performed well in strong markets such as Europe, China and India but experienced challenges in the United States and the U.K.,” he said.

Gauging the future

Gauging future performance, he said, is difficult. “Experts are having a hard time projecting worldwide press demands,” he said, adding that estimates range from a decrease of 2 percent to a growth rate of 3 percent. “The bottom line is that nobody knows,” he said.

Still, he said, newspaper growth is occurring in selected worldwide markets such as China, India, the Middle East, South America and Eastern Europe, and those are the areas MAN Roland will concentrate.

“In past years the newspaper industry has experienced outstanding profitability,” he said. But the current capital crunch, exacerbated by banks’ unwillingness to issue credit, complicates the market, he said.

“Some banks are not willing to deliver the necessary funds,” he said. “We see a trend that banks are becoming ultraconservative and that it will take longer for customers to obtain credit.”

At the same time, newspapers have to change the way they do business to survive, he said.

“The newspaper industry has had a monopoly for so many years. It needs to diversify and develop a product portfolio that reflects diversity of the marketplace.

“What clearly is lacking within the newspaper industry is the strategic communications to its members,” he said.

The MMM?

This means publishers have to work together to create a strategy that encompasses multichannel distribution, multiplatform access and multimedia directions — an MMM response to the World Wide Web, he said.

Newspapers also have to continue to change the way they look and are produced, he said, citing the automation and commercial features being planned by Transcontinental Inc. and its MAN Roland-anchored production plant in northern California.

MAN Roland Chief Financial Officer Dr. Ingo Koch, meantime, said while the company is prepared to issue its initial public offering, current economic conditions don’t yet warrant it.

Going public was part of the plan outlined by Allianz Capital Partners when it purchased a majority stake of MAN Roland in 2006.