The company says the volume of orders on hand shrank by €160m to €721.6m, and as a result has had to axe some 400 jobs from its sheetfed facility. A statement says that the financial crisis is impacting severely on Germany’s export-driven engineering industry, and KBA is no exception.

KBA says, “With many customers postponing projects, over the past two months the volume of new orders for commercial and newspaper web presses has fallen well short of expectations.”

The company adds,”Management is hoping that the mounting uncertainty induced by the economic recession will ease in the next few months, and that demand for presses will pick up again as a result.”

However the KBA also revealed that if the market fails to improve, the need to control costs in order to remain competitive means it cannot exclude the possibility of further retrenchments.

The company concludes that after having cut several hundred jobs at its web press production plants, it is unwilling to lose more staff that will be difficult to replace when the economy picks up again.

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