Print Innovation Asia Issue 11 2021
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CGS ORIS - set to blaze the colour trail in Asia Pacific in 2022 As we enter 2022, Print Innovation Asia caught up with Christoph Thommessen, Managing Director Global Sales for CGS ORIS to review the past year and lay out exciting plans to extend its colour expertise reach in Asia Pacific even more. 1. As we close for 2021, kindly give us an update on how CGS ORIS has been doing overall, and comment on Asia Pacific specifically? Of course, CGS ORIS has also not been completely unaffected by the current pandemic. Initially, it was difficult to understand the impact of all the restrictions as they came in gradually, step-by-step. We could not imagine a world without traveling as we usually try to keep close personal contact to both our clients and our dealer network. But as everybody else
we had to adopt to the (still) unreal scenario: meetings on MS Teams or Zoom became a common practice, trainings and installations were done remotely. Despite all those difficulties we managed to have a good year overall, both globally, and also in the Asia Pacific region. In some areas, we have actually enjoyed growth, compared to 2019, since we have a strong foothold in many geographic and vertical markets and we were able to shift our focus on lucrative markets and niches.
We have had several major upgrades in our software despite the pandemic, and a lot of these tools are addressing the packaging market. We noticed people in Asia Pacific are very curious about new developments and willing to be entrepreneurs in their segment. Take extended gamut printing as an example: Besides being very critical about the impression of the colour, many printers are interested to print more sustainably. In this area, we can definitely help with our solutions, supported by our strong technical team in Asia Pacific. They have shown their technical expertise by helping our client Huayuan in China to achieve the world’s first G7 certification for metal printing, just as an example. 2. What are your thoughts on CGS’ current reach in Asia? What plans do you have to grow in this region? During Covid, we spent the time preparing our team and channel partners for when the pandemic ends. We have had some restructuring of our Asia team, which already started before the Covid-19 outbreak, and will most likely take more people on board. This is especially so in China as the growth there is exponential. All our team members are very enthusiastic about colour; and they all know what they are talking about.
