The price rise, which is in response to rising materials, energy and other input costs, is intended to help return the group's sheetfed division to consistent profit, something it has failed to achieve in consecutive years since 2007.

A look at the group's results since then paints a revealing picture of the declining fortunes of sheetfed offset press manufacturers, which has resulted in large-scale redundancies since 2008 at the three big German manufacturers - Heidelberg, KBA and Manroland -  and led to the latter's insolvency in 2012.

While KBA has been the only one of these three to return a positive bottom line since 2009, this has been in spite of rather than thanks to the performance of its sheetfed division, which has returned an operating loss in all but one of the past five years.

The biggest of these was in 2008, when KBA's sheetfed division recorded a €188.4m operating loss. This improved to a €23.1m operating loss in 2009, before a small operating profit of €8.2m was returned in 2010.

However, 2011 brought a return to the red, with an operating loss of €22.1m, while for the first nine months of 2012, KBA's sheetfed division was running at a €21.4m loss.

In the last two consecutive years that the division returned an operating profit (€5m in 2006 and €1.6m in 2007), KBA's sheetfed turnover was €870.6m and €856.9m respectively. By 2011 this had fallen by almost a third to €583.6m.

KBA has obviously undertaken significant restructuring of its workforce, as well as comprehensive cost reduction measures in that time and executive vice-president for sheetfed sales Ralf Sammeck argued that the economic benefits to the user of KBA's latest generation of presses were worth the "moderate price increase".

"With the Rapida 106 and Rapida 145 which we presented at drupa 2012, we offer users the most modern and efficient sheetfed offset presses on the world market for the medium and large formats," he said.

"The innovative technology of our highly automated presses, and their many unique features in terms of automation, fast makeready and inline processes, bring economic benefits for the user and enhance the long-term value of an investment, but they naturally also cost money.

"The market, however, has recognised this added value. We were able to record a significant increase in both orders received and turnover in the sheetfed offset segment in 2012, and have further reinforced our position as the second-largest manufacturer in the world.

"In our opinion, the competition in this market is too price-driven. Needing to utilise excessive capacities, some manufacturers in the industry have for a long time concentrated blindly on securing market shares, regardless of any losses and to the detriment of their external investors.

"That hardly makes sense. The moderate price increase for our sheetfed presses is justified by their technical features and will contribute to sustainable improvement of our profitability."