Cary Sherburne: Hi. I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Jochen Meissner from Goss International, President and CEO, and you guys are located in beautiful Durham, New Hampshire, right—it’s beautiful this time of year.

Jochen Meissner: Exactly, yeah.

Cary Sherburne: Soon you’ll have snow.

Jochen Meissner: Still enjoy the summer.

Cary Sherburne: And you’ve had a few years of experience going to drupa, I understand. How many drupas have you been to?

Jochen Meissner: I’ve probably been to six or seven drupas by now.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, that’s a lot of drupas. And so I wanted to kind of get your, you know, your feeling or your opinions about first, as an exhibitor, why this show is important to you. And then secondly, you know, kind of why an attendee should take the time to go.

Jochen Meissner: Well, drupa is really the only global show in the world. There are many regional shows and I think there will be further concentration on regional shows. And in a slow-growth environment that we currently see in printing, I think it’s very important that there’s one strong global show where many suppliers can showcase their technologies. For Goss, it has been always a great backdrop to show our new technologies to a global audience and, you know, we’re looking forward to the next drupa 2012 to demonstrate and introduce our new line of printing equipment for the packaging industry.

Cary Sherburne: Oh okay, oh okay, because you’ve been focused mostly on newspapers, right?

Jochen Meissner: Well, I think currently we are in two fields. One of our legs is newspaper; the other one is what we call commercial printing primarily for magazines and catalogues. And we have taken our Sunday technology that basically was a game-changing technology over the last 10-15 years, and we are using that as a base technology for our entrance into the packaging market.

Cary Sherburne: Oh that’s very exciting, that’s very exciting. So other than visiting your stand at drupa, what advice would you have for attendees? Why should they go?

Jochen Meissner: Well, I think everybody is going to show interesting technology at drupa. I think a lot of talk will be about what we will see in the digital area, and I think you will see digital not just with the usual suspects, but you will also see digital equipment integrated in offset technology. Because I think it’s not an either-or, it’s probably more a question of how do we combine these technologies to maximize the results for the printers.

Cary Sherburne: And you know it’s interesting, as you get into the packaging industry in particular, the ability to maybe put inkjet heads with the web presses and be able to put, you know, in a single pass the bar codes and the expiration dates and all the other information that goes on certain types of packaging. That’s huge.

Jochen Meissner: I think it’s a must in today’s world. The requirements for packaging printers are such that, you know, single-package control for quality reasons and for safety reasons will be a mandate throughout the world. So the—and again, that is one of the reasons why digital printing and conventional technology will be combined in the future.

Cary Sherburne: You know it’s interesting, some of the consultants in these interviews about drupa, we’ve been talking about, you know, what is this drupa? Because, you know, we had the digital drupa and we had the inkjet drupa last year and, you know, what’s this one going to be? And a couple of things—obviously, there’s going to be increasing developments in inkjet—but a couple of different aspects is it seems like there’s more, much more focus on hybrid production like you’ve been talking about and also, sort of a multi-vendor support, you know. Not many plants have only one vendor any more, right? So you need workflows that can support multi-vendor.

Jochen Meissner: I think the concept of being a one-stop shop is probably not going to work. Software technology changes very quickly. Printing technology changes at a much lower pace and I think you will see some newcomers, but I think you will also see, as we saw in plate-making some years ago, you’ll see very quickly a consolidation and only the real strong players will remain.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah. Well, we will look forward to seeing you at drupa 2012 starting May 3rd. It’s going to be here before we know it, huh?

Jochen Meissner: Exactly. And I look forward to good weather in Düsseldorf and asparagus.

Cary Sherburne: And there’s plenty of spargel, yes. And you know, since you’re from Düsseldorf, maybe you can just give us a quick idea on, you know, what’s the most fun thing to do in the Altstadt—drink beer.

Jochen Meissner: I guess it’s drink up beer.

Cary Sherburne: It’s terrific spending time with you, Jochen. Thank you.

Jochen Meissner: Thank you.