Heidelberg Innovation Week receives high level of customer interest

Offers positive assessment

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Heidelberg
Heidelberg Innovation Week receives high level of customer interest

The five-day innovation week held by Heidelberg saw several thousand registrations from more than 100 countries, several hundred one-to-one discussions arranged with decision-makers, and around 100,000 hits on videos. This online event just finished. Taking ‘Unfold your potential’ as its slogan, it focused on transferring knowledge relating to the urgent issues in the sector. With product presentations on its latest highlights, innovation talks, and personal discussions via video chat, Heidelberg provided a comprehensive overview of its offerings in the commercial, label, and packaging segments.

Heidelberg
Heidelberg Innovation Week

“The feedback we have received so far from participants and our partners has been truly overwhelming,” says Ludwig Allgoewer, head of global sales and marketing at Heidelberg. “The participants praised the format and the content presented.” The combination of short, professionally produced videos and innovation talks with the option of follow-up live chats in which the content presented could be discussed in more detail with around 300 Heidelberg experts from around the world went down well with the participants. “As a result, Heidelberg was able to register specialist customer contacts on a similar scale to an international trade show,” Allgoewer continued. “We are confident that the numerous customer discussions will also generate business contracts in the near future.”

End-to-end production in the spotlight

At the heart of all the presentations was the optimization of the entire process in offset and digital printing, all the way through to end-to-end production. This is based on the enhanced Push to Stop technology with all its facets, including automatic optimization of job sequences and navigated printing, accompanied by user-friendliness for operators thanks to easy-to-understand user interfaces, all of which – combined with ‘integrated intelligence’ – enables highly productive operations with fewer staff and skilled personnel. Heidelberg also provided supplementary information about offerings in the fields of Prinect workflow, consumables, and contract business. This did not focus on presenting individual product functions but rather on responding to the most urgent customer requirements in the respective market segments.


“The priority is no longer simply achieving the highest possible printing speed – instead, we aim to make the entire process as efficient as possible. Boosting productivity offers the greatest earnings capacity for industrial print shops. Digitization is key to this – and that is precisely what we demonstrated at Innovation Week,” says Heidelberg chief executive officer Rainer Hundsdörfer. “The response to our innovation week underlines how it is possible to use digital formats to successfully contact customers and get them excited about innovations, even in the middle of a global pandemic.”

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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