Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I'm here with Stefan Hunkeler who is the CEO of Hunkeler. It must be a family business.

Stefan Hunkeler: It is, yes actually.

Cary Sherburne: How long have you guys been in business? A long time.

Stefan Hunkeler: Yes it’s 90 years old this year. We have 90 years.

Cary Sherburne: But you weren’t there when it started.

Stefan Hunkeler: Not yet. I was five years old then.

Cary Sherburne: Five years old then, okay. And one of the really interesting things about Hunkeler is the event that you do every couple of years called Hunkeler Innovation Days. So I had the honor of being there last year, last time with WhatTheyThink and it was quite an impressive event. So maybe you can talk a little bit to our viewers about why you do the event and what it means to the company and to your customers.

Stefan Hunkeler: Oh it’s the main target is to bring together the whole world of digital printing, digital finishing, suppliers and to bring all the executives together in one hall so that they can discuss their solutions, their ways, their strategies with all the experts.

Cary Sherburne: So the visitors that come, come time after time after time. They come back because it’s such a valuable focused conference.

Stefan Hunkeler: Yes, I think it has established in the last years as a good event and an interesting event for the customers and the suppliers also.

Cary Sherburne: So now last time actually that was where Xerox chose to make the announcement about their inkjet press, the CiPress. And also I think you had something like 20 full manufacturing lines so people could see end-to-end from the time the file came in to the time it was finished and out the back end. So are we going to see a similar kind of thing this next time?

Stefan Hunkeler: Yes, we will show a lot of integrated solutions, combined solutions. There will be also announcements from other vendors for new world premieres, let’s hope like that. So what we will show to the customers the whole work flow and the whole connectivity between the solutions.

Cary Sherburne: And they also love the networking opportunities.

Stefan Hunkeler: Yes.

Cary Sherburne: And so what’s the dates?

Stefan Hunkeler: We will have it from February 11 to 15 so it’s in the Valentine’s week again. So some of the customers will bring their wife with them.

Cary Sherburne: And some of the customers will bring chocolate back to their wives?

Stefan Hunkeler: Well, of course. Yes. That’s something you cannot miss in Switzerland. Bringing back chocolate.

Cary Sherburne: Because it’s held in Lucerne, right? Lucerne, Switzerland. So you fly into Zurich and take the train down.

Stefan Hunkeler: Yes, Zurich is the main airport. Take the easy train for 40 minutes to Lucerne and…

Cary Sherburne: And how many – do you have an idea of how many people will be attending? I mean usually it’s what? In the thousand people range?

Stefan Hunkeler: We had 5,000 attendees last time.

Cary Sherburne: Oh my gosh, I was off a little bit, wasn’t I.

Stefan Hunkeler: Five thousand attendees. We expect more or less the same. We don’t want to grow to 10,000. We want the right people there to concentrate. We will do the show one day longer than before and that’s for two reasons. One is because that’s not so overcrowded and the second one is that it’s Carnival in Switzerland in Lucerne so Monday at the beginning of the show there will be a big party here in Lucerne. So the ones who like that can combine it with Carnival and the other ones at the end of the week for the second weekend.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great. So some people might come for one or two days and some people might come for the whole duration.

Stefan Hunkeler: For the whole show, yes. But the on an average time the people stay two days.

Cary Sherburne: Two days. Well, we will be there also. WhatTheyThink will be there doing video and we’ll look forward to talking to you when we get there.

Stefan Hunkeler: Yes, perfect. Thank you very much. See you in Lucerne.

Cary Sherburne: Thank you so much for sharing this.