The good news from press maker Koenig & Bauer is apparently, that you’ll have to wait.
The German company’s order backlog has grown 19 per cent to a record more than a billion Euros (A$1.626 billion), thanks mostly to orders from this year’s DRUPA trade fair.
Chief executive Andreas Pleßke said the record figure showed Koenig & Bauer was “excellently positioned on the market” with a broad range of innovative products.
As a result, the company is expecting a strong final quarter and has confirmed its 2024 outlook with operating EBIT “at the lower end of the forecast range of 25-40 million Euros” and revenue target of around 1.3 billion Euros.
“As expected, group revenue of 819.6 million Euros after nine months is below the previous year in a persistently challenging market environment, but a sequential improvement is evident.”
Pleßke says a large part of the order backlog will be placed on the books after 2024 and is spread unevenly across the segments.
The company’s ‘Spotlight’ programme will make a decisive contribution to achieving profitability targets and strengthening competitiveness, he said.
Also among good news is that a successful tender to the US federal printing office will lead to an order for more banknote presses – helping the ‘special’ division to a higher-than-average EBIT contribution – and a triple sales success for K&B Celmacch with first Chroma systems sold in Africa (Kenya) and Asia (South Korea). In North America, another RotaJet web-fed digital press cements progress on ‘connected packaging’ solutions, seen at DRUPA.
Orders in the ‘sheetfed’ division were up 12.6 per cent for the first nine months, but those in ‘digital & webfed’ (at 107.3 million Euros) were down on the previous year’s 132.9 million Euros. The digital web sales contributed to a more vibrant 2024Q3, with orders on 52.9 million.
Group EBIT dropped 55.6 million Euros in the nine months – the 6.8 per cent margin compared to -0.2 per cent the previous year, mostly a result of fewer orders in 2023Q3.
Pictured: An AI-generated packaging image presented a look into the future