Mr Kurreck, H.C. Moog is focused on packages of particularly high quality for, inter alia, cigarettes. Well, cigarette consumption has been decreasing in Europe and the USA for years. Have you noticed declines in business in this area?

Achim Kurreck: For us, this development is rather an advantage. Since the international cigarette industry has responded to the sales decrease by strengthening its premium brands. This means, the package is becoming increasingly sophisticated. There are more and more special applications for the production of small quantities, and hence the demand for our machines is growing. They are also capable of producing high-quality packages at favourable cost. With our sheet-fed gravure printing solutions, there is, e.g., considerably less waste than with other printing methods.

Sales of newspaper publishers, too, are decreasing due to lower and lower numbers of copies. Is the development there similar to that of cigarette packs?

Kurreck: This is exactly what we are noticing. Above all international trade journals and image brochures are now being extremely enhanced. Quite often with metal or structured coatings in order to achieve visual and haptic effects. In most cases, they are used to enhance the cover, but sometimes for the inside pages as well, so for the total print product.

China is a country with a huge range of magazines. And smoking is still widespread there. Does this fact make China an interesting market for H.C. Moog?

Kurreck: We went to China nearly twenty years ago, but have largely pulled out of this market by now. For two reasons: On the one hand, because the cigarette industry has changed. Back then, there were more than 600 different cigarette brands in China. Therefore, sheet-fed printing was good business for printing houses. Now, as a result of the government-mandated consolidation, the number of brands produced in small quantities is very low.
The second reason why we have withdrawn is product piracy. In recent years, rather little has changed despite numerous protests. Establishing production facilities in China would mean nothing else but the release of our know-how for counterfeiting. As the head of a small family-owned company, I am planning for the long term. We simply cannot afford this risk in China.