Business News
Herbert Frey retires
Friday 17. July 2009 - After more than ten successful years as Managing Director of manrolands subsidiary company Frey printcom GmbH, Herbert Frey (67) has retired. Gerd Finkbeiner, CEO of manroland AG, bade farewell to Herbert Frey on the opening of the Oskar Koller exhibition in Augsburg. The artist was one of Freys close friends.
Frey can look back on a career in the graphics industry that lasted over 50 years, starting in 1956 as a chemigrapher. After his apprenticeship he worked at lithographic studios in Munich and in 1962 he joined the graphics supply company Böttcher & Renner in Nuremberg. The dealerships he managed there included Miller Johannisberg-Druckmaschinen. Herbert Frey played a major role in this companys success up until 1988 and then founded Herbert Frey GmbH in 1989. The partnership with manroland started in 1999 and, as Frey is happy to admit: “That brought me back at last to my second greatest love, printing presses.” Since 1999 Herbert Frey GmbH and printcom GmbH which was established in 1993 have been integrated in the manroland Group as a Competence Center for the Groups systems business. Today Frey printcom has 40 employees and makes an important contribution to the success of the above-mentioned systems business. Herbert Frey and his wife Hildegard managed the company for ten years and Frey will remain available to manroland in an advisory capacity. His successors are Oliver Pfirmann and Mirko Kern who are looking to continue the companys success under the guidance of Dr. Peter Conrady.
Farsighted entrepreneur
Customers as well as companions, colleagues, and fellow staff not only had the opportunity to pay tribute to a doyen of the graphics industry. In the afternoon they visited manrolands new Print Technology Center in Augsburg to become a meeting place and platform for international industry experts for exchanging ideas concerning technical developments, prospects and market requirements. With symposiums, conferences or Open-House events, manroland will play an even more active role in promoting know-how transfer. In the evening the opening of the exhibition “Light and Color” provided a colorful backdrop for the farewell to Herbert Frey. The exhibition showed the powerfully colorful and vivid favorite works of the artist Oskar Koller, influenced by his travels that led him all over the world. manroland is a patron of the event and invites all watercolor and acrylic painting enthusiasts to view the artists work from July 10 to September 6, 2009 in the Toskanische Säulenhalle (Tuscan column hall) of the Augsburg Arsenal.