Hope for commercial return in Heidelberg print data

Offset press giant Heidelberg is releasing details of press usage around the world for the first time, with results confirming that commercial work collapsed during the crisis, but giving hope that it will return, with Chinese print now back to normal.

The report says during the coronavirus pandemic, print production in China fell by up to 80 per cent compared with normal volumes, but recovered as the infection curve fell, and is now back to last year's levels in both the commercial and the packaging/label segments.

While print production in all other countries was stable until mid-March 2020, and was above the level of previous years, the outbreak of the pandemic and the shutdown in the countries has led to a significant reduction in print volume worldwide, especially in the commercial market.

Around the world, the packaging and the label segment is stable in the coronavirus period, mainly due to the increasing demand for food and pharmaceutical packaging. Nevertheless, local supply problems such as the discontinuation of paper production in India are having a negative impact on this segment in some countries.

Australia and New Zealand, along with Europe, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and India suffered the worst falls in commercial print production. The US, Russia, Turkey, and Scandinavia were also badly hit although not by as much.

The ANZ market also fell back in packaging and labels print, at the same rate as the UK, whereas Europe, the US, and Canada were barely affected.

Heidelberg is presenting its Print Media Industry Climate Report in public for the first time. The company provides weekly updates on the development of print volumes in the packaging and label printing and commercial printing market segments.

The representative basis of the anonymised data is formed by around 5000 selected offset presses of all format classes at customers worldwide who are connected to the Heidelberg Cloud.

The current data for around 50 countries per segment is determined from this and displayed on a world map. The colours shown on the country map are indicators of how the estimated current production in print shops is compared to the previous year. The scale ranges from 1 (serious impact of Covid-19 on production) to 8 (production above last year's level), with 7 representing production at last year's level.