Our company has changed and a new chapter has started - Rock Robots s.r.o.
After thirteen successful years on the Czech media market Rock Media's printing plant closed on December 31st 2015. Company renamed itself to Rock Robots and will dedicate its future to research and work with new manufacturing technologies.
Company's managing director Antonin Herbeck admits that the decision to close down printing business was one of the hardest in his life. "We built our printing plant in a space where everyone thought it would be impossible. Then our competitors were literally giving us months before we fail. During past thirteen years we managed to print most prestigeous titles on Czech and Slovak publishing market. All our employees should be proud of what we have together achieved."
However changes in publishing market forced the company to rethink its strategy. It was clear that best days of print business have passed and the fight for survival started. Young readers do not want to pay for information - they find it readily available on the internet. Newspapers and magazines were losing readers every year and advertisers started to spend their budgets in sexier digital media. Antonin Herbeck has had enough.
"We faced a difficult choice - either keep printing and fight for survival by lowering our prices and effectively printing at a loss, or find another area of business. We decided to do something different."
Thanks to long-time experience with motorsport the company had an idea about its future. "We decided to focus on design and production of parts for race cars from carbon, kevlar, aluminum and steel. We purchased extremely modern 5 axis CNC machine DMG HSC 105 and heavily invested in CAD/CAM software and training. We are doing prototype work as well as small series of bigger parts for motorsport, auto market and industrial design. We are also looking into 3D technology, but at the moment the costs are still high. Our company is on a path which is not easy and again is full of obstacles, but perhaps this is the most thrilling part of our journey."