The spend comes after the Swindon-based company appointed Anthony Thirlby to the role of managing director from his previous operations position.

ESP's new press replaces a B1 Speedmaster CD102 at the commercial and publications printer and is expected to produce more than £3m of sales on an annual basis.

Anthony Thirlby, managing director of ESP Colour, said: "We always want to be in line with the technology available and the XL 75 will give us greater control and greater capacity."

He added: "We always do our ROI analysis very stringently and when we analysed this press against a 102, the analysis pointed us clearly towards the XL 75''.

The 68-staff printer, which specified the new press with Inpress Control, Intellistart and Colour Assist software, will be operational by mid-February.

It will handle a workload of around 15 jobs a day with run lengths of on average of 1,750 transferred from the existing press.

Thirlby added: "Not only did it give us similar if not slightly more capacity but at the same time it will enable us to control cost capacity requirements."