Newspaper printing and coating technologies are combined with the rebranding of Wifag Maschinenfabrik as Wifag-Polytype Technologies.

Chief executive 
Jörgen Karlsson says a new company name which expressed “our integration in the corporate group, our intensive development activities and the breadth of technologies we make available for machines, processes and materials”.

He says newspaper and book production systems – still under the century-old Wifag name – will continue to be an integral part of the group’s portfolio with subsidiaries in Germany, China and the US unchanged.

Digital printing is among additional areas of expertise where it is hoping to make its mark, with work on a water-based inkjet technology for printing on substrates including paper, plastics and aluminum.

A pilot version of a new Techma-4 digital press (pictured) has been shown at an open house at the company’s headquarters in Fribourg, Switzerland, along with digital print advances from the new fluid technologies centre formed from the acquisition of Swiss company Ilford Imaging’s research team.

Wifag-Polytype’s corporate group added drying technology (through a majority stake in German maker Pagendarm in 2007) and digital printing (from Spühl, which it bought in 2008). Among projects, the company provides the digital engine for Swiss manufacturer Steinemann’s dmax digital off-line varnishing system.

In addition to Solna – which it bought in 2011 – the automation competence centre has been boosted with the recruitment of a team previously with EAE in Ahrensburg.

Parent company WIFAG-Polytype Holding is wholly owned by the Ursula Wirz Foundation. Former president of Wifag, Wirz died in 2007 leaving the basis for a charitable foundation whose aims include promoting research into printing technologies.

Karlsson however, emphasises performance over PR: “We have no song-and-dance shows here,” he says.