Finkbeiner’s manroland: Strong enough to bend

Strong enough to survive alone, manroland is nonetheless looking for partners with which to plan a future without Heidelberg. That’s the message from the German web press maker’s chairman, Gerd Finkbeiner in an interview with ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ newspaper last week. The interview – text of which was issued by the company – covers what happens after manroland “called off” merger talks with Heidelberg. Finkbeiner says sales in the first nine months of the current financial year fell by 32 per cent, but that shareholders will use equity capital to repay debts from the acquisition from MAN group. Of the 654 million Euros purchase price, 380 million Euros was borrowed capital. But Finkbeiner says this debt has been reduced to 125 million and the company was debt-free on a net basis at the end of 2008. “And we will soon be completely debt-free,” he says. Freedom from debt will put the company in “a very good position”, allowing it to further develop. Asked whether Allianz was once again taking a risk in order to make the company more attractive when they exit later, he says, “You can interpret it that way if you like”. He says manroland has not been talking with Shanghai Electric – Goss International’s major shareholder, with which it has been linked in the past – but is examining “what could intelligently fit together”. An inter-German merger is not ruled out, but possibilities would have to be examined “on a case-by-case basis”. Finkbeiner points to manroland’s “extremely high-performance” sheetfed press manufacturing plant in Offenbach – created by the consolidation with four others over ten years – and says it will use the new financial latitude to address gaps in its geographical presence and product range. “Among other things, we are interested in a cooperation for digital printing which will increasingly supplement industrial-scale printing,” he says. “We also want to grow our business in newly industrialised countries where we are not present, and are looking for cooperation partners.” Convinced that the printing press market will never fully recover to the level before the crisis, Finkbeiner says manroland is reducing capacity to 70-80 per cent of 2007. “Then we had sales of around 2 billion Euros, and in future we will be profitable with less than 1.4 billion Euros,” he says. Capacity utilisation is currently running at a “too low” 50 per cent, but in the sheetfed segment both the number of employees and fixed costs are being reduced by a third. Staffing has already been cut from around 9000 employees to “close to 8000, and this will be reduced to around 7000,” he says. “Here prolonging short-time working is of course helping us a lot. “I believe these measures will be sufficient.”