Koenig & Bauer

Koenig & Bauer AG

Company type	Aktiengesellschaft
Traded as	FWB: SKB
Industry	Printing press Manufacturing
Predecessor	Albert-Frankenthal Planeta Druckmaschinenwerk
Founded	1817
Founder	Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer
Headquarters	Würzburg, Germany
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Andreas Pleßke (CEO)
Products	Printing presses
Revenue	1,115.8 million EUR (2021)
Number of employees	5,397 (2021)
Website	koenig-bauer.com

Koenig & Bauer AG (; FWB: SKB) is a German company that makes printing presses based in Würzburg. It was founded by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer in Würzburg in 1817, making it the oldest printing press manufacturer in the world still in service.

95% of the banknotes used in the world are printed on printers made by Koenig & Bauer Banknote Solutions SA, a division of Koenig & Bauer.^{[citation needed]}

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History

Founded in 1817, by the 20th century Koenig and Bauer had become a major company and the world's leading manufacturer of security printing equipment.

In 1951, the firm began to suffer from the age of the designs of the machines it was selling, some of which dated from the early 1920s, and its chairman, Hans Bolza, faced up to the need to come to terms with Gualtiero Giori, an Italian printer and inventor with a company in Lausanne who had made great advances in intaglio printing. Bolza established an immediate rapport with Giori, and the deal they signed in 1952 led to a long-term agreement in 1958. Koenig & Bauer surrendered to Giori its distribution rights, even in Germany, but gained the exclusive rights to manufacture Giori machines, and the two had a long and profitable association.^[1] In 2001, after Giori's death, Koenig & Bauer acquired his company, Giori SA, part of which was renamed KBA Giori ^[2]

Printing capacity

The table lists the maximum number of pages which the various early 19th-century press designs of Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer could print per hour,^[3] compared to earlier hand-operated screw presses. The table includes those designs which were constructed by the pair in England before the establishment of their company upon their return to Germany.

	Gutenberg-style ca. 1600	Stanhope ca. 1800	Koenig & Bauer 1812	Koenig & Bauer 1813	Koenig & Bauer 1814	Koenig & Bauer 1818
	Hand-operated presses		Steam-powered presses
Impressions per hour	240 ^[4]	480 ^[5]	800 ^[6]	1100 ^[7]	2000 ^[8]	2400 ^[8]

Notes

^ Bender 2006, pp. 57–62
^ Solomon 2014, p. 207
^ (see Talk)
^ Wolf 1974, pp. 67f.
^ Bolza 1967, p. 80
^ Bolza 1967, p. 83
^ Bolza 1967, p. 87
^ ^a ^b Bolza 1967, p. 88

References

Bolza, Hans (1967), "Friedrich Koenig und die Erfindung der Druckmaschine", Technikgeschichte, 34 (1): 79–89
Wolf, Hans-Jürgen (1974), Geschichte der Druckpressen (1st ed.), Frankfurt/Main: Interprint
Bender, Klaus W. (2006), Moneymakers (1st ed.), Weinheim: WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH
Solomon, David (2014), The Plastic Banknote: From Concept to Reality (1st ed.), CSIRO Publishing