The company sold 44 machines at the event and made £2m in sales, its biggest ever haul at a print show.

The company added that over the next 12 months it anticipated an additional £3m in sales on the back of the show.

Highlights at the event included the first ever UK sale of the Alpha Saddle, the company's first foray into ‘heavy metal' machinery.

M&H Print Finishers signed up for the first Alpha, with the machine due to be installed this autumn.

An aggressive publicity campaign for the machine appears to have paid off as five were sold to UK companies at the event.

Meanwhile, Synergie Group spent £570,000, Duplo's biggest ever sale, on kit, including a three DC-645 slittercutter-creasers with integrated folder, two DPB-500 perfect binders (one PUR, one hotmelt), two Digital System bookletmakers, a 3500 and a 5000, a DCM-52 creaser-perforator, two DC-10/60 Pro Collators and a three-knife trimmer.

Duplo chief executive Ro­bin Greenalgh said: "It's a real vindication of Duplo's strategy to expand its focus to include a much wider range of products."

 Instead of 100 customers buying just one machine, we have 100 customers buying two, three, four, five machines and that means that we can become a £120m turnover company instead of a £40m one.

"The industry has gone through a transition as new people have come into the business of print because of digital printing.

People have realised that we develop, design and create this stuff in-house and it's actually a bit quaint to suggest that we then have to farm it out to be finished five miles down the road."