Josef Taus

Former state secretary of Austria chairman of the supervisory board of ÖIAG welcomed the Club for Trade Delegates.

Dr. Josef Taus - well-known as former state secretary of Austria, and as chairman of the supervisory board of ÖIAG (the Austrian state corporation holding company) - and also for being an entrepreneur who has put a number of companies back on their feet - welcomed the Club for Trade Delegates, and gave an insight into his world of management, finance and consulting. In the last few decades he has built up a conglomerate of more than 30 companies in various fields of business including, besides printing; access control, machine tool manufacture, and software; with a consolidated turnover of about 800 million Euro.

Part of his "Emporium" is the Herold printing centre, printing the daily newspapers "Die Presse" and "Wiener Zeitung" (the world's oldest newspaper) and "Heute" (Austria's most successful free paper).

The tour part of the programme started with a walk through the AV+Astoria Druckzentrum, guided by CEO Dr. Dieter Simon, where the focus is on the high quality printing of material such as company annual reports.  Here the printing is done by sheet-fed offset printing machines. Then the trade delegates were taken by the CEO of Herold Druck, Ing. Leopold Kurz, on a tour of  his part of the business, where they were shown the very large continuous-roll printing machines, delivering newspapers on a just-in-time basis - meaning "right to the minute".

Both of the managers gave very informative insights into the Austrian media business and how it works. Full answers were given to direct questions put by the trade delegates, including some about how the companies handled the business environment of this kind of business. The presentations, the impressive equipment and the explanations of the opportunities offered by "on-demand" digital printing, customized to the limit, gave a good comprehensive understanding of the company - from its history and tradition through to its customer orientation and state of the art operation.