KBA Selling Gravure Business to Cerutti

The agreement was approved by KBA’s supervisory board at its latest meeting. The sale to Cerutti of KBA’s gravure business, which for some time has felt the impact of weak demand in the gravure market, will lead to personnel changes at KBA’s production plant in Frankenthal. As KBA president Albrecht Bolza-Schünemann had already announced in the company’s half-year report published in mid-August, slack demand in the newspaper industry during the past eighteen months also means that capacity must be reduced at KBA’s newspaper production plants. The scenario envisaged by the board of directors for downsizing capacity and safeguarding earnings will first be discussed by the competent worker committees before concrete figures are released. Despite the slide in demand for multi-unit press lines the KBA board reaffirmed its forecast that group profit and pre-tax earnings in 2007 would be roughly on a par with the previous year.