The axe has fallen for Manroland Sheetfed. The German manufacturer of sheetfed offset presses is shutting down its operations after the search for a buyer failed. According to information published in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the news was announced at a staff meeting. Production of new machines will cease at the end of May, and operations will cease at the beginning of June. Almost all of the 740 employees will be affected by the job cuts. A reduced team of around 80 people will remain mobilized until the end of the year to manage the end of operations and prepare for the eventual sale of the spare parts and service activities.
Placed under protective insolvency proceedings in March, the subsidiary of British group Langley Holdings was unable to attract an investor to continue production of its Offenbach-based offset presses. "There are people interested in taking over maintenance contracts, but not for production on the site" works council chairman Stefan Vogler told FAZ .
The future of the employees still mobilized will depend in part on possible buyers for the service activities, still under discussion.
According to Stefant Vogler, again quoted by FAZ the closure of this 114âeuros000Â m2 site, which traces its origins back to 1871, is due in particular to the downturn in the Chinese offset market, with printers preferring to repair existing presses rather than buy new ones. In passing, he deplores the Groupâ??s strategy of relying so heavily on this geographical area that it has become dependent on it.
Unions and employee representatives, for their part, denounce a lack of investment on the part of Langley Holdings since the takeover in 2012. They point out that investors are only interested in the patents, not the production site.
This closure brings to an end an industrial history spanning more than 150 years. The origins of manroland Sheetfed can be traced back to two German industrial lineages: Augsburg, where the Man Group's history in press construction dates back to the mid-19th century, and Faber & Schleicher, founded in 1871 in Frankfurt and subsequently transferred to Offenbach.
Faber & Schleicher established itself in lithographic presses in the 1870s, then in 1911 launched the first Roland sheet-fed offset press, which gave the brand its lasting name. In 1979, the Offenbach-based company merged with the press division of Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg (Man) to form Man Roland Druckmaschinen. Following Manroland's insolvency in 2011, the businesses were taken over separately in 2012: the Augsburg web offset press division became manroland web systems, then merged in 2018 with Goss International to form Manroland Goss web systems, and the Offenbach sheetfed division was taken over by Langley Holdings under the name Manroland sheetfed.
