drupa news: Goodbye MAN, hello manroland

MAN Roland kicked off the drupa press conference season with a new look and a brand new press for the small format market.

German press giant, MAN Roland, used its drupa press conference to launch a new brand identity and logo for the company. The company will now be known as manroland AG (one word, all lower case) and has introduced a new logo to replace the famous MAN arch used by the MAN Group.

Chairman of the executive board, Gerd Finkbeiner, said the new name and look was part of a continuing programme to position the company in preparation for its public float although he refused to be drawn on when that might be. It was incorrect however, he stated, to say that the proposed IPO had been postponed or was 'on hold' as no specific date for it had previously been made public.

Finkbeiner went on to outline a number of core branding and values associated with the new company name. Among these, manroland aspires to be a "high performance business partner" to its customers while its core values have been defined as groundbreaking, reliable, determined and inspirational.

Pictured: three wise men - Dr Ingo Koch, Paul Steidle and Dr Markus Rall.

In terms of new products, the main development was the introduction of a new press for the small sheet size market. The Roland 50 press is designed for a maximum sheet size of 360 x 520 mm with substrate thicknesses from 0.04 mm up to 0.8 mm, making it suitable for printing on light board. Demonstrated at drupa in a five-colour model, the press includes many trademark manroland features found on the larger presses, including double-size impression cylinders and transferters for sheet travel.

Gerd Finkbeiner commented that the addition of the Roland 50 to the company´s product line-up would enable it to plug a gap in its portfolio and appeal to a far wider group of printers, many of whom may subsequently go on to use larger presses.

"We were in the past handicapped by not being able to cover that market," he said.

Other developments in the sheetfed sector include perfecting for the Roland 900, of which two 4/4 machines have already been sold, and the addition of inline cold foiling on the Roland 500 model.

In the web market, the presses continue to get bigger and faster. A test unit of a 96-page Lithoman heatset press is being demonstrated on the stand with a contract for the first installation due to be signed during the show. One new development is the Rotoman DynaChange which allows a fifth unit on a Rotoman press to be changed offline while the rest of the press is still running.

Overall Finkbeiner was fairly upbeat about the prospects for the print industry and the future of manroland despite a downturn in the world economy and negative factors such as the high level of the Euro compared to other currencies.

"If we see a couple of clouds in the sky, let's not talk about a downturn," he said, pointing out that at the last drupa nobody had predicted an upswing in the market and yet that's exactly what happened.

"There are so many ugly things in the world," he commented. "We just have to deal with it."