Welcoming the world

There's no doubt this Drupa faced perhaps the greatest challenge in the trade show's 60-year history. Almost immediately after the doors closed on the record high of Drupa 2008, the world's economies came crunching to a halt. Did this financial disaster dampen the spirits of the organisers of the biggest event on the global printing industry calendar? Not at all, says trade show director Manuel Matare:, from organiser Messe Düsseldorf, and exhibition president Bernhard Schreier:, chief executive of Heidelberg, who are expecting this year's exhibition to be a landmark in cooperation and technological advances.

ProPrint's readers - Australian and New Zealand printers – are as far away from Düsseldorf as you can possibly get. Why should our readers come all the way over here for the show, especially in the modern age, where information is so immediate and available online?

BERNHARD SCHREIER: It's very simple. Yes, your readers who are so far away are not far away from information –you can get information from anywhere. The question is how reliable is that information. At Drupa, you can talk to people face to face and touch equipment and get a demo and find out what others think about it.