Heidelberg has developed the Heidelberg Cloud as global industrial IoT solution for all its machines. Today more than 13.000 machines worldwide are connected to this central service. Together with the Heidelberg Assistant – the window to this cloud – the customer get access to machine availability and performance data. Heidelberg provides a full stack of value-add services from remote diagnosis in case of a machine repair up to predictive monitoring and full performance subscription. The wealth of machines connected, together with access to other global, economic data allows a statistical exploration of the Print Media Industry.
The PMI (Print Media Industry) Climate Report was developed in 2020 at the request of many of our customers to help them better understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We visualize the PMI development per country and month in comparison to the world economic climate during the Corona pandemic. The color scheme is aligned with common climate maps, where blue colors indicate a cool down and brown colors show a warmup. In the PMI Climate Report the schema is applied to the industrial print production strength of sheetfed offset in relation to the previous year.
The year 2021 marks a recovery with a high dynamics, particularly during the months of April and May. While packaging and label printing have maintained high volumes throughout the pandemic, commercial printing is showing stable upwards trends after last year's sharp decline.
Originally the Heidelberg PMI Climate Report was created at the request of customers with the objective of supporting them during the first wave of COVID-19. At a time of great uncertainty among all market participants in the printing industry, we believe it was important to understand which countries are affected and how.
We have seen that the impact and also the recovery of the Print Media Industry is highly dependent of country measures and the development of the local GDP and industrial production. Therefore we continue this publication with a visualization of the recovery phase achieving a “New normal” after Corona.
This report estimates the impact of the economic trends per country to the print media industry. The color code is similar to climate maps (where we got the name from): Blue colors show a cool down of the industry while brown colors indicate a warming up compared to the production level we have seen in the stable year 2019.
The expert team of Heidelberg uses macroeconomic data from several institutes. We will continue the time series in the global map as soon as new indicators influence the recovery trend lines. Usually you can expect an update every quarter.
Status: 10.03.2021