Over the years, there have been a few foundation companies who have driven the development and growth of print production. Companies like Kodak, Dupont, 3M, Agfa, Heidelberg, KBA, Komori were a few among the leaders in their respective areas of print manufacturing technology. As digital technology evolved to both drive and meet the new market requirements, some of these companies either found a new diminished role, merged with their former competition, or changed product focus. And while many companies with newer technologies entered the market, for those of us who have followed and supported these foundation companies over the years, watching their market position diminish brought a certain degree of despair to the industry. After all, many print service providers built their businesses with and around the offerings of these companies. 

These technological changes had a real impact on the market. During and after the 2008 financial crisis, while print production declined more than 8%, equipment investment dropped by 50%! This was an awakening, and at least one of these classic companies, Heidelberg, decided to take a look at their focus and positioning to develop a new strategy for approaching the market going forward. At the core of their strategy was creating offerings that “support our customers and create more output, while focusing on the income of Heidelberg and the output of the industry,” according to Stephan Plenz, Heidelberg CTO. Part of that strategy required that they embrace digitization across their product lines. This would include using digital technology to enhance their existing offset products, as highlighted by their new “Push to Stop” tagline introduced at drupa 2016. However, it also includes the introduction of new line of digital print technologies that supports their customers’ current and future production requirements.

At drupa 2012, Heidelberg first announced their intention to enter the digital print production space with branded third-party solutions, and at drupa 2016 they firmed up their offerings with the introduction of their internally developed and manufactured “Fire” line of products which currently focuses on label and packaging production. These include the cut-sheet Primefire for carton production, the webfed Gallus Labelfire and entry-level Smartfire for continuous-feed label converting, and the Omnifire for direct-to-object printing. However, it should be understood that these new products were not designed to replace their existing offset and flexo products, but to complement them in a production environment based on production requirements. In fact, they were even designed to work in tandem with the existing analog technologies using many of the same underlying components to ensure production compatibilities. From a manufacturing standpoint, products in the entire line of “Fire” are designed to use similar and compatible technologies as well.