Digital money forces world's biggest money-printer maker to find new biz

Printing on beverage cartons is ane segment where the company plans to stir up the market with super-fast machines, after entering the flexible packaging printing segment in 2013

Germany’s Koenig & Bauer AG, the market leader for machines that print our banknotes, is challenged by e-commerce, mobile payments and digital currencies. The 201 year-old company’s answer is to push into markets such as printing on Coke cans.

“Here we are attacking the former monopolist”, Chief Financial Officer Mathias Daehn said in an interview at the company headquarters in Wuerzburg, referring to Stolle Machinery, a unit of Japan’s Toyo Seikan Group Holdings Ltd while picking a lidless Coke can from his windowsill.

Koenig & Bauer dominates the market for printing on three-piece food cans, but the more sophisticated printing