Koenig & Bauer
company
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.
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. In 2001, after Giori's death, Koenig & Bauer acquired his company, Giori SA, part of which was renamed KBA Giori
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, 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.
“Koenig & Bauer” enters the record as company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Koenig, Bauer and company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Koenig & Bauer” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Koenig, Bauer and company provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q462264. VIAF identifies the subject as 139014818. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1817, 1951, 1952 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Koenig & Bauer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.