The Innovation Week, with the theme of ‘Unfold Your Potential’, runs from 19-23 October. It will involve sales staff in more than 35 countries, 15 time zones and 30 languages and will be the first time Heidelberg has run an event of this type. 

As well as a raft of sessions around Heidelberg’s latest solutions for commercial, packaging and label printing, the topics include autonomous printing and productivity gains. Customers can book slots at a country-specific level with members of the manufacturer’s local teams.

Partners Polar, Masterwork Machinery and Zaikio are also involved.

Heidelberg UK managing director Ryan Miles said the event was an example of how companies needed to adapt their ways of doing business.

“We want to keep our customers up-to-date with all Heidelberg products & developments. Innovation Week will present the newest tools to increase the productivity and competitiveness of our customers print shops,” he said.

Cluster marketing manager Eirini Spanou added: “We have 23 people taking part from the UK, across product management and sales. It’s something unique and a good opportunity for customers because we have everybody there.”

Heidelberg has also put in place Covid-secure measures at its Brentford showroom to allow customers from the UK and Ireland to continue to have in-person demonstrations at the facility.

Separately, service director Ian Wilcock gave an update on the trends from Heidelberg’s global press performance tracking data at a BPIF webinar last week.

Its Print Media Industry Climate Report has received more than 30,000 visits since it went live six months ago.

Wilcock said that the study was entering a new phase.

“We’re now moving into another phase of the project where we aim to use the data that we’ve gained as a long-term data pool for how the industry will develop in the future,” he said.

It harvests performance data from 13,000 presses in 50 countries. Just shy of 290 presses in the UK contribute to the survey.

Wilcock said that Heidelberg had identified three different types of customer in terms of how printers had been affected by the Covid-19 crisis.

The groups are: ‘Crisis Boomer’, typically printing for pharma, hygiene and food. These customers initially had problems with meeting surging demand.

“Packaging printing around the world has grown by approximately 20% compared with the previous year,” Wilcock said,.

The second cohort is ‘Crisis Affected’, eg printing brochures for products where demand dropped during lockdown.

“Strong recovery has been seen at quite a number of our customers who are extremely busy now,” he noted.

However, Wilcock said the stimulus programmes in Germany had been “somewhat more effective than those in the UK” in driving levels of impressions.

The third group is ‘Crisis Shocked’, printing for clients in business areas that have been shut down, or really struggled, such as holidays, hospitality and expos.

“We see that these customers are still very highly affected and the recovery is a long way away from actually being started.”

The Print Media Industry Climate Report data for week 39 shows that packaging and label printers in the UK are “in the green” and ranked at 7.2 on the scale from one to eight.

However, UK commercial printers are still showing with a red ranking of 4.5, defined as “major impact” with reduced production and some presses shuttered or shifts taken out.

Register for the Heidelberg Innovation Week here, or via Heidelberg’s myHD app.