The Print Media Industry Climate Report, published by Heidelberg at the end of April 2020, was a key factor in its recently reported success. For the second consecutive time, the Heidelberg Digital Unit (HDU) is being honoured with the Capital Award in the ‘core-business-related innovation’ category as one of Germany’s top digital labs.
In particular, the award recognised the company’s ability to continue developing innovative projects, even during the current Covid-19 pandemic. Its Print Media Industry Climate Report provides a weekly update on printing volumes for the market segments of packaging and label printing, and commercial printing based on global, objective real-time industrial internet of things (IIoT) data.
Some 5000 selected offset presses in all format classes operated by customers worldwide that are connected by the Heidelberg Cloud, which has access to more than 13,000 machines, create the representative basis for the anonymised data. This random sample corresponds to around 20 percent of global industrial sheetfed offset production, which makes it highly significant. Capital’s panel of judges commented as follows, ‘Not only is the company helping to tackle the crisis with this tool. It can also make a name for itself outside this otherwise rather unremarkable sector.’
‘The Heidelberg Digital Unit is making a key contribution to our digitisation strategy. By winning the Capital Award 2020, it has once again highlighted the possibilities of data and the practical customer benefits of digitisation solutions in our core business, especially in time of crisis,’ said Heidelberg CEO Rainer Hundsdörfer. ‘In addition to giving our customers and the company itself a better idea of the impact of the Covid-19 crisis, the results of our Climate Report also provide sales and service units with a starting point for overcoming it,’ he added.
The latest Climate Report evaluation shows how Covid-19 is affecting the sector around the globe. There was a positive start to 2020, with print volumes significantly exceeding production in the previous year. The extent to which print shops’ production volumes have been hit correlates closely with the country-specific infection rates and lockdown measures. While commercial printers work at a much reduced capacity at the peak of the infection, packaging and labels are in above-average demand during this period. It appears that as the economic situation begins to return to normal, the printing industry is also starting to recover. Commercial printing is picking up again, while the considerable increase in the production of packaging and labels is coming to an end.
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Heidelberg Graphic Systems Southern Africa (Pty) Ltd
+27 (0) 86 142 4756
warren.jones@heidelberg.com
www.heidelberg.com/za
