Dinwoodie, who has overseen a period of phenomenal adjusted diluted EPS growth from 1.6p when he took over as chief executive in 2003 to 43.2p in 2013, said: "After 12 challenging and enjoyable years at Xaar I have decided to retire during 2015.

"My decision is entirely a personal one and I remain fully committed to continuing the development of the company between now and my planned retirement date. We are beginning the search for my successor now, and I will ensure a smooth transition occurs during 2015."

Despite Xaar's record results, the firm's share price took a hit on Dinwoodie's departure announcement, dropping 10.5% to 880.9p before recovering slightly to 919p at the time of writing.

Adjusted full year revenues at the Cambridge-based inkjet printhead manufacturer grew 55% to £134.1m on the back of a surge in sales to industrial markets, up 79% to £98.2m. Sales to this segment, 90% of which relate to the ceramics market, accounted for 73% of Xaar's total adjusted revenue.

"The key momentum has come from the continued acceleration of the conversion from analogue to digital in ceramic decoration," said Dinwoodie. "In second place was the acceleration in label conversion from analogue to digital - packaging overall grew by about 30% and labels within that grew by 50% so we're starting to see some progress there."

The rapid growth in demand from the ceramics market in the past 12 months has resulted in "extremely high asset and people utilisation" at Xaar's Huntingdon manufacturing facility, which Dinwoodie said was "running at something close to 140% capacity for most of the year".

This contributed to record gross margin and operating margin, 52.9% and 30.4% respectively, although this is expected to fall back a bit as Xaar invests £30m in adding 75% manufacturing capacity for its 1001/2 product in Huntingdon in 2014.

"Both gross and operating margin we'd expect to see coming off a little bit but gross margin should still be north of 50% and operating margin high twenties," said Dinwoodie.

Meanwhile, following four years of substantial revenue and profit growth, Dinwoodie said growth was expected to be "more modest over the next period" as ceramic sales flatten out at their current level.

"The ceramic conversion is at a steady state now. It took three years to get to about a 20% market conversion; last year converted 20% in a single year and we're expecting that 20% per annum conversion rate to continue for the next couple of years," said Dinwoodie.

"So that fairly big chunk of our business now becomes fairly flat and the incremental stuff then is the labels, some of the other packaging spaces and some recovery in graphic arts; whilst they can be growing quite nicely - as a proportion of a much bigger number now we're looking at something like 7-8% growth next year."

In terms of where that growth will come from, Dinwoodie said: "Multiple areas of packaging are very much on our radar over the next couple of years.

"[It's] not key to the numbers yet but this direct-to-shape technology - where people are eliminating the label stock completely off the bottle - we're starting to see that begin to get some attention in the market. We've got field trials with that going on with major partners this year, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out."

"Some recovery in graphic arts can also make our number move quite a bit even though that's just recovering market share after falling away a little bit in the last few years."

Dinwoodie said this was the result of a lack of product offering - as Xaar's P3 technology was very much focused on the industrial marketplace, which has different characteristics to graphic arts. "We've got our first P3 graphic arts product coming out now and there'll be more of that as we go through the next couple of years," he added.

Xaar increased its R&D spend by over 100% to £16.4m in 2013 and has therefore appointed its first chief technology officer, Edmund Creutzmann, who will join the board on 1 April, bringing 30 years of digital printing R&D expertise with Siemens and Océ Printing Systems.

Xaar's net cash increased by almost £25m to £53.5m at 31 December 2013. While the firm increased its final dividend to 5.5p giving a total gross dividend for the year of 8p (2012: 4p) Dinwoodie said there was no intention to pay a special dividend.

"We will let the cash grow whilst we evaluate the options of investing in P4 manufacturing implementation. That decision should be made in 2014," he added.