KBA chief claims 2009 is too tough to call

Failure by sheetfed printers to follow through on drupa orders forces further redundancies on the German manufacturer.
Following a ten-day closure at the KBA Radebuel plant near Dresden, the company is looking to move its workforce onto short-time work to cope with a 15.8 percent fall in orders for sheetfed presses. The company is consolidating its sheetfed factories in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic after doing the same in its web division. The sheetfed division posted a double-digit loss in the quarter.

The only bright spot was a modest profit generated solely by web and special presses.

Albrecht Bolza-Schünemann, Ceo, flagged 600 jobs to go out of a workforce of 3,600. He expects the company to post a group loss overall at the end of the calendar year.

In an indication of the uncertain future facing the industry, the company issued a statement saying there was no point in even trying to predict next year’s events.
‘In view of the current turmoil in the international business environment, and unforeseeable developments in financial markets, Bolza-Schünemann sees any attempt to predict KBA’s path beyond 2008 as entailing too many unknown factors to be of any merit.’