Every press order counts, and "the Ifra" in October tends to be the occasion on which manufacturers present their findings on market and market share.

And everyone's a winner - as Mae West would have said - "if you know how to work it".

German makers KBA and manroland have already exchanged their positions by media release - broadly summarised as leader in high-performance newspaper, and leader in web-offset respectively - and each reprised these at their WAN-Ifra World Publishing Expo media events in Hamburg this week. At their media conference, manroland's Joern Gossee put last year's overall market at 342 million Euros (including 200 million Euros newspaper) and its own share at a third of newspaper presses and "nearly every second commercial web". It claims orders to keep it busy into 2017.

KBA's Müller stressed its "significantly lower dependence on the shrunken web offset market compared to competitors", adding that it contributes less than 15 per cent of group sales totaling 1.1 billion Euros.

Goss International strutted its stuff more modestly at one-to-one briefings, but had an impressive map showing its commercial web activity, especially in North America and with ongoing projects such as Polestar in the UK.

While these orders help keep press makers healthy, our primary interest is in newspaper, and the point has been made that with total volume so small in today's shrinking market so small, a couple of presses here or there can make all the business.

Goss's Eric Bell told me manroland largely kept out of the US, and the homeland maker - now proudly back under American ownership following completion of the acquisition by AIM, although not yet of the former Chinese joint venture - is reaping the rewards. Most or all of the heatset kit it sells in the country is produced there and for whatever reason, the next two single-width Magnum Compact presses sold - for Community Impact in Austin and a customer in Mexico - will also be built in Fort Worth.

While it is the intention that AIP will acquire the Chinese operations, it hasn't happened yet, and a six-tower Universal 75 for People's Daily was built in the US at the customer's request. The delivery list is comprehensive and apparently even includes Printstreams and V30s.

Both the German majors have had flirtations with Asian manufacture in order to compete in the single-width market - last year accounting for almost half the volume - where "low-cost" and "German engineering" are effectively incompatible terms. manroland has a stripped-down single-width press - complementing its more expensive Cromoman - ready, but lacks a customer for it. It's a segment where the company developed a "built for India" 4x1 Cromoman version - multiple of which have been delivered to Bennett, Coleman & Co - only to find that publishers in other countries were interested in cheaper presses.

And not necessarily new ones: in the aisles, I got talking to a Florida printers' engineer who had driven a project for a Canadian publisher based on an "obsolete" KBA Colora tricked up with product and control automation, and there's some of this spirit in at least one major project currently underway in the USA.

DCOS recently completed a major drive and control upgrade on an elderly Geoman, bringing contemporary benefits to what had been confirmed as a mechanically sound base, and specialists Harland-Simon and ABB do these things routinely for customers around the world.

Both the German press makers have entered the fray, and manroland is close to completing the development of a complete range of control systems which include colour registration and now density control - IDCμ for newspapers, from through its Grapho Metronik subsidiary - under a new PECOM-X umbrella brand. Integration and queue management for hybrid offset/digital operations are also part of the offering.

The first IDCμ system has been commissioned at Druckzentrum Oberfranken in Bamberg, Germany.

If that evokes memories of Heidelberg's "total solution" world domination days, a solution is emerging. For those with proprietary control systems - such as those of his QI Press Controls and EAE companies - Menno Jansen told me of the growth of the Prime Network which builds and shares interfaces so that companies can differentiate themselves "by who we are, not by the interface protocol".

As control automation becomes almost the key element in production, that's an increasingly important factor.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: manroland web chief executive Joern Gossee