Good things come in small parcels as I said a couple of weeks back, and this week’s World Publishing Expo qualified for both adjectives, especially for print publishers.

Still the world’s premier newspaper event and delivering one of the best this year, it attracted neither the stand acreage nor the visitor numbers of many previous WPE and IfraExpo events.

That’s a reflection of the state of a fast-changing industry, which in “mature” printed newspaper markets has seen the focus move from new installations to minimising costs and waste.

Newspaper press manufacturers are feeling the pinch almost more than anyone, and this year the three majors – KBA, manroland and Goss – had got together to compare notes and broadly agree market figures.

KBA president Claus Bolza-Schüneman told his company’s annual press conference that the global volume of new web press orders – including newspaper and commercial presses – will reach a new low of below 300 million Euros. That’s the total spend with KBA, manroland, Goss, Mitsubishi and TKS, as well as smaller single-width focused manufacturers.

manroland presented figures for the first nine months of this year showing 153 million Euros of new newspaper press orders, with itself taking 29 per cent, Goss at 21 per cent, KBA and Japanese maker TKS level-pegging at seven per cent, and the predominantly single-width Indian-owned Manugraph-DGM at nine per cent.

Geographically, India and China have become major influencers and there have been so few double or triple-width orders that single-width orders and players have become more prominent.

In that context, manroland’s Dieter Betzmeier confirmed that the new single-width press his company has designed – and which the industry expects will be built in India – won’t be making an appearance in the next 12 months. It appeared as a concept, however, in a presentation about hybrid offset and inkjet options the company was exploring.

Also at the smaller end of the market, it’s been a year in which Goss has showcased its automated Magnum Compact press – seen as an alternative to inkjet for ultra-shortrun static print – and taken its first orders. The second of these, to Sri Lanka’s Express Newspapers, was officially announced in Amsterdam, although GXpress readers knew about it weeks ago.

Installation of this and the original order for Advance Publications in New York – currently held up over issues with the Staten Island building – will become critical reference sites for prospective buyers keen to see more than the single-tower Shanghai demonstration press in operation.

Both companies want to deliver short runs of their newspaper editions in quick succession, and Kodak was among exhibitors at the World Publishing Expo keen to show publishers another way.

The reconstructed and now, we are assured profitable imaging company has two irons in the fire on shortrun and variable newspaper printing. Its Prosper inkjet printheads – in use for popular tabloids such as Germany’s Bild and News UK’s Sun – are being combined in banks to deliver four-colour printing with the potential of page-width imaging.

In Amsterdam, Kodak introduced a new customer’s plans to produce a personalized Dubai daily on its new high-speed Prosper 6000 inkjet web. Samer Sabri Abdel Qader, a director of Masar Printing & Publishing, said the project would enable readers to specify news topics of interest which would be printed and delivered in association with newspapers including Al Bayan.

And the day after the Expo closed, RoddWinscott of Chicago’s Topweb continued the theme at the World Printers Forum, detailing his company’s end-to-end production of ethnic and community newspapers on two TKS inkjet webs. Digital is the ideal medium for papers, some of which have moved from his Goss offset presses as circulations dwindled, although some others have grown beyond it.

With the Belgian Kerk & Leven publication – 300,000 copies of which are printed on Canon/Océ equipment and put directly into the mail (see GXpress July 2013) – these add another sought-after perspective for those looking for a business model for digitally-printed newspapers.

The argument of course, is that as newspaper circulations continue to fall, such opportunities will become more important.

One hall of this week’s World Publishing Expo – and two days of the accompanying World Printers Forum – were committed to the success of much bigger printed-newspaper models, but change is inevitable and these projects and products were indicative of an industry that’s not lying down in the face of the challenge of mobile and social publishing.

Organiser WAN-Ifra says almost 7000 visitors from exactly 100 countries – the largest number of countries in the history of the event – were at the Amsterdam expo, with 225 exhibitors from 29 countries covering the whole gamut of the industry. Among them Menno Jansen said QI Press Controls and EAE – which he owns with Erik Van Holten – closed orders worth more than five million Euros.

Next year’s Expo will be in Hamburg, Germany, from October 5-7.

Peter Coleman

More reports on www.gxpress.net

Right: Topweb president Rodd Winscott

On our homepage: KBA president Claus Bolza-Schüneman