December, and that end of the year feeling is becoming more and more overwhelming. Thinking ahead to the fresh year that awaits us, what, I wonder, will the "new normal" be as we enter 2010?

A thought-provoking meeting yesterday with Christian Knapp and Mark Nixon at KBA UK yielded some illuminating stats about how the company views the new world order ahead.

The manufacturer estimates that the global market for printing presses - including newspaper presses, commercial web, sheetfed, flexo and gravure, but excluding digital - was typically worth around €9bn in a normal, pre-crisis, year. In 2009 that has crashed to €3.9bn, with sheetfed sales halved and web presses seeing the sharpest fall at 80%.

KBA's view is that the market will never rebound to that €9bn figure, rather it will stabilise at around €4.4bn. This goes some way to explaining the group's decision to dilute its reliance on print by diversifying into non-print areas such as solar energy.

This pessimistic scenario is in line with the recent pronouncements of Roto Smeets chief John Caris, who isn't banking on an upturn any time soon either. Caris believes that 2010 will be on a par with this year, and that we are entering a new era based on 2009 volumes - with future growth of perhaps 2%-3% on that.

In contrast, Heidelberg chairman Bernhard Schreier seems to have a more optimistic view of the prospects for post-recession recovery, stating that orders are bottoming out and printers will invest again once the economy picks up.

Who's right and who's wrong? The only thing that's certain is there is no one size fits all outlook. Caris, for example, believes that small web offset presses can't compete, and yet here in the UK we have an obvious example of a 16pp web house that outperforms all its rivals in terms of profitability.

There's always an exception or two to the rule, as PrintWeek's Top 500 demonstrates. Planning for the worst while hoping for the best has never been more pertinent.