The inkjet manufacturer aims to grow sales to £220m by 2020. It had turnover of £96.2m last year.

It has teamed up with BASF in the burgeoning 3D printing arena, and the two companies will collaborate on photopolymer jetting. Xaar said the partnership “will enable manufacturers to produce 3D parts with improved properties and lower costs than currently possible”.

The alliance is centred around Xaar’s new High Laydown Technology combined with innovative photopolymers from BASF.

Xaar and BASF are also looking for companies in the field of bespoke or standalone 3D printing machinery for industrial parts manufacturing to join the collaboration.

Separately, Xaar subsidiary Engineered Printing Solutions (EPS) has signed up pad printing specialist Comec Italia as the European distributor for the EPS range of direct-to-shape digital printing systems. Comec’s headquarters are near Milan.

The two companies have worked together for more than 30 years, as EPS has been the US distributor for Comec’s products since 1985.

EPS showed a new cylindrical object printer at the InPrint show in Munich this month. The UV-LED system prints directly onto cylindrical, flat wall or tapered objects at up to 800pph. It uses Xaar 1003 printheads.

Xaar is also preparing for full commercialisation of its delayed 5601 platform, the manufacturer’s first Thin Film printhead. It showed samples of A4 output in CMYK at InPrint, produced using eight 5601 printheads.