Heidelberg's latest set of full year accounts showed a net loss of ￡186.5m. The firm now plans to return to profitability with its cost-saving 'Focus 2012' programme. Chief financial officer, Dirk Kaliebe (pictured) discusses the results with Print Monthly.

The financial results are not good figures for Heidelberg and its investors? Is that something you would agree with?

Yes, they are disappointing in general terms but, we have taken action to reduce our cost base leading to the extraordinary charge which was the reason for the heavy losses of ￡105m.

The programme of cuts is well under way now?

It is well under way and is ahead of our timing – we assume the full benefit will come in financial year 2013/14 and that in the current year we will have achieved one third of the savings.

Some of the measures you have implemented such as the hours reduction to 31.5 hours at your German plants, how long can they continue for?

It is unlimited, we have an agreement that we are going to make 2,000 people redundant and in addition we have the agreement that we have reduced the working hours indefinitely.

Over the past year we've seen troubles afflicting manroland and Kodak among others. Has this forced the Heidelberg board's hand in terms of having to implement the cost cutting. Is it down to pressure from investors?

Yes, that was part of it. However, we made our own decisions back in 2008 when the crisis started and we estimated a drop of 50 percent. We took out ￡388m in costs and we implemented that  successfully but the assumption was the recovery would go back up to 75 or 80 percent - today we are still on a level of 60 percent. With the uncertainty of the markets we have made cutbacks on the basis of the current levels, even though we'll see growth in the current year up to about 70 percent of the 2008 peak. We are planning conservatively but, if the volume rises as expected we would have a very good situation because costs would be at a lower base and we could bring production up once the demand is there.

The company has had a tough few years, receiving credit from the German government. What is the future for Heidelberg?

Printing has been here the last 150 years and we are 100 percent convinced that it will be here for the next 50 years – the market will stabilise. Heidelberg's market is about ￡12.1bn a year at the minute and that will grow over the next ten years to about ￡16.2bn. We can make profit in this market and there will be growth opportunities in the advancements we showcased at Drupa such as packaging and 3D printing. We see good growth and profitability in the market.

Can you ever see Heidelberg becoming a fully fledged engineering company rather than just being a printing engineering company?

We have already made some progress in this direction – up to ten percent of our top line is coming from markets outside of print media. However, print media is still attractive enough for us to be the number one solution provider in the industry. We just have to adapt our resources into the right areas of print media. Our commitment is to be number one in printing but also take our USPs and transfer it to other industries.

What message do these results send out to the market?

We are bringing our break even level down to below ￡1.9bn although we still believe we'll have a top line of between ￡2bn and ￡2.4bn. Mid to longer term we have business opportunities that will bring us above those figures. In two years Heidelberg will be profitable with the elements that we have implemented. This is good for investors as we admit that, we haven't had any positive news in the past three years but in this tough environment we are convinced we have taken the right actions.