The new seven colour plus double coater, which is expected to start printing in mid-March, arrived at Oriel’s Hull site on 7 February.

Replacing Oriel’s seven-colour, single coater Heidelberg Speedmaster CX 102, the XL will print at a maximum rate of 1,500sph faster and will allow Oriel to complete double coated work in a single pass.

Richard Simms, Oriel’s managing director, told Printweek: “It will easily give us a 25% boost. Heidelberg said it would probably give us 40-50%, but the proof is in the pudding as we do a lot of complicated jobs on specialist materials.”

The CX press that Oriel decided to replace was traded back to Heidelberg as part of the purchase. The younger of two Heidelberg presses that Oriel ran, it offered a higher deposit against the XL, according to Simms.

He said: “We traded it for two reasons: it had more mileage, because it was the machine that performed longer runs, and also because of the higher deposit.

“The CD 102 [Oriel’s older Heidelberg] is still in amazing condition, it produces top class work. So we thought we’d go for the larger deposit against a new machine.”

Oriel, which employs 29 staff and turns over around £3m, is looking to grow business steadily with the new Speedmaster.

Simms said: “I’m hoping that we can do 10, 20%, or more. But it just depends on everything that is going on in the world right now.

“The added cost of energy has been killing us for a couple of months, but we have managed to find a more sensible tariff from April.”

He added that with the uncertain economic outlook, business had suffered in the past few months, but signs already pointed towards a bounce back.

He said: “It wasn’t fully ideal timing [considering the Speedmaster purchase] but we fully expect the work to come back - the signs are already there that the workload is coming back.”