The 14 employee, £400,000 turnover company bought the folding machine at the Print Efficiently 2012 exhibition, hosted by Intelligent Finishing Systems at its Perivale showrooms.

NS Print director Reg Parsons said he hoped the investment would increase the company’s annual turnover to £500,000.

He said the family-run company had been looking for a more up to date machine to complement its 25-year-old UFO folding machine.

He added: "Our old folder is 25 years old. It’s a good workhorse - my wife likes it and she works in the finishing department so it has to stay! But the new machine is faster and produces more complex folds at a better standard."

"In the demonstrations we were impressed to see the Horizon machine complete a quadruple fold with a cross fold in half an hour. A job like that would normally take us four hours," he said.  

Parsons said the machine’s small footprint was one of its selling points. "Our premises are 150 years old – they’re not like the new open plan places. We can’t have huge machines."

As well as allowing the company to do more of its work in house, the new machine will also allow NS Print to deliver jobs more quickly to its customers.

"It’s miles to the nearest city and customers don’t have the time to wait for us to send jobs off to trade folders, any more."   

NS Print is now looking at Horizon’s tower collator, bookmakers and stitch liners to improve its collating and stitching lines.