Schmidt draws a line on three decades of KBA PR

Oct 23, 2017 at 08:11 am by Staff


Klaus Schmidt was already halfway through his 28 years as Koenig & Bauer director of marketing and corporate communications when we told him we were launching GXpress Magazine.

But I still recall recall the groan at the prospect of "not another" trade publication (writes Peter Coleman).

An overpopulated market has thinned somewhat since, and things were happily a little different at the Ifra World Publishing Expo in Berlin this month when he told us he was taking the opportunity to retire at the end of the following week.

"It's a good magazine, one of the good ones," he told Dagmar Ringel by way of introduction, following her appointment from technology group Zeiss to head the company's public relations.

It's been a good relationship too, dating personally from the installation of telephone directory presses in Australia and then the double and single-width newspaper presses which were part of the flood of heavy metal into the country at the turn of the century. An innovative hybrid press for the West Australian in Perth, and others for News Corp on the Gold Coast and in Hobart and Darwin, were part of the success of the then newly-formed local subsidiary, and were complemented by others notably at Singapore Press Holdings.

And talking of heavy metal, there have been a mass of sheetfed installations over the years; one I recall attending was "opened" by rocker-turned-politician (and back) Peter Garrett, lead singer of Midnight Oil.

It's a much-changed Koenig & Bauer - recently reverted to its founders' names - which presents at industry events today. With the market for large newspaper presses greatly diminished, the company now derives most of its growth from packaging print and specialist segments such as digital and security printing. Not that there isn't the occasional double-width offset or event waterless press in the mix occasionally.

Schmidt has taken the opportunity to retire after the bicentenary and Berlin Expo, bringing to a conclusion 28 years as director of marketing and corporate communications, and a longer period with the company. Now 63, he represented managerial staff on the supervisory board from 1993-2016, and served on the supervisory and advisory boards of numerous German and international subsidiaries.

Over the course of almost three decades, Klaus Schmidt has helped to shape the public and market image of the group, one mammoth task being to oversee the presentations which marked the group's bicentenary celebrations last month.

He is succeeded by Dagmar Ringel, who brings more than 20 years experience with international companies including HP - now a digital print partner of K&B -and Zeiss.

Pictured: Klaus Schmidt (right) with Stefan Segger, who moved from the Asia Pacific subsidiary to be sales director at KBA-Digital & Web

Above: Dagmar Ringel

Sections: Print business

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