GRAFOTRONIC Brand Guidelines: A 2004 Swedish/Polish Label Finishing Maker Built in Warsaw

Founded in 2004, built in Warsaw.

GRAFOTRONIC makes finishing machines for printed label reels: the equipment that takes a roll from a digital or flexographic press and die-cuts, laminates, embellishes, inspects, slits and rewinds it. The company describes itself as a Swedish/Polish company founded in 2004. A member-news item published by the European label association FINAT in April 2023 gave the same founding year, said the group is headquartered in Sweden and placed its factory in Warsaw, Poland.

The founder is named in an earlier FINAT item, from March 2022. It reported that Håkan Sundqvist, described as GRAFOTRONIC’s President and Founder, cut the ribbon on a new section of the Warsaw plant together with Mattias Malmqvist, then vice president for sales and marketing, and Tomasz Skrobik, vice president and chief technology officer. The opening took place during a meeting of the company’s distributors, which doubled as a launch event for new machines.

The two-country set-up runs through everything the company publishes. Its own site says it moved in 2016 into a modern factory in Warsaw, where it says about 200 people, including 30 engineering graduates, develop and test the machines. The March 2022 expansion added 1,600 square metres and, FINAT reported, nearly doubled the size of the facility. Sales and service sit closer to customers: the company lists centres in Chicago, Brescia, Leicestershire, Alblasserdam and Paris, and the 2023 FINAT item placed its American subsidiary in Lake Zurich, Illinois.

Modules that bolt on.

GRAFOTRONIC’s machines serve the converter’s finishing department rather than the press hall. Its current range is grouped into families. The digital finishing family is led by the DCL 2, a modular finishing and converting line, with the smaller CF 2 and SCF for compact set-ups. The inspection slitter-rewinders include the HI 3 and the SR 3, plus a PHARMA 2 model for what the company calls 200 percent re-inspection. Laser finishing is sold under the SCI-FI name, embellishment under HAPTIC, and a workflow automation suite called IQ runs across the lines.

The central idea is modularity. The company says that in 2015 it redesigned all its machines around a fully modular concept in which each module works independently, and that a new module can be fitted to an existing machine on site in under eight hours. It also says it builds its own electrical systems, makes most machine parts in-house and writes all of its own software, and that its machines are connected online so that its service team can follow them remotely and spot slight changes in each servo motor over time.

Trade coverage shows how that works on the ground. At the March 2022 distributor meeting, FINAT reported, GRAFOTRONIC presented its HAPTIC embellishment series, which uses hot stamping and screen printing, and an EDGELESS laser process in which the label material is delaminated from its liner, cut by laser from the reverse side and laminated back onto a liner the laser never touches. It also introduced the first version of IQ, a set-up system in which cameras and sensors take over manual adjustments at each job change. In April 2023 FINAT reported that Lauterbach Group, a Wisconsin label and packaging converter, had installed an HI3 inspection slitter-rewinder, described as third-generation and fully servo-driven.

Partnerships with other suppliers are part of the picture. A press release dated March 2024 announced a global partnership with Leonhard KURZ, the German thin-film and digital embellishment company, pairing GRAFOTRONIC’s modular machines with KURZ embellishment technology. For Labelexpo Europe 2025, Domino Printing Sciences announced in September 2025 a joint “We are hybrid” stand that combined Domino’s N730i inkjet integration module with GRAFOTRONIC DCL2 converting and finishing stations, running from substrate preparation to finished label rolls in a single pass. GRAFOTRONIC’s own preview of the same show listed an X-1 semi-rotary die-cutting unit, a new generation of SCI-FI laser and an automatic turret named Infinity, powered by Serame.

How label machinery presents itself.

Label presses are built for converters, the printers who turn reels of paper and film into the labels on bottles, jars and cartons. A narrow-web press is usually a long inline machine: the web unwinds at one end, passes through a row of printing units, often with UV curing between them, then through foil, varnish and die-cutting stations before the finished labels are rewound as a reel at the other end.

The makers present themselves through that machinery. Their brochures and websites show the web path running from unwinder to rewinder, rows of identical printing units, die stations and close-ups of printed label reels, and they describe presses by print width, the processes a line can combine and the materials it can run, from self-adhesive paper to film and carton.

Much of the selling happens in person. Makers run demonstration halls where converters can watch a press run their own jobs: Gallus says its Experience Center in St. Gallen covers nearly 2,500 square metres and also shows partner machines, and Nilpeter listed technology centres in Denmark, the United States, Thailand, India and Brazil in 2019. Gallus asks converters who want a live demonstration to arrange it through Heidelberg’s local sales and service units.

Trade fairs set the rhythm of launches. Labelexpo, held in Brussels for Europe and in Chicago for the Americas, is where many presses are first shown: Nilpeter launched its FA-Line at Labelexpo in Brussels in 2005, according to FLEXO magazine. The makers in this guide range from family companies to subsidiaries of larger press groups, and each guide sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and what rests only on the company’s own word.

Future safe, connected, modular.

GRAFOTRONIC’s public identity is engineering-led. The headline on its website reads “Changing the world of digital finishing”, and its pages return to a small set of phrases. “Future safe” describes machines that can be upgraded module by module, “connected” covers remote service and machine data, and “Automation 4.0” is the company’s term for linking machines to the order workflow, from order to finished product. Its product names are short codes such as DCL 2, HI 3 and SR 3, with words kept for families such as SCI-FI and HAPTIC.

Its scale figures are its own. The company says it has supplied about 1,500 machines to more than 60 countries. Its 2023 FINAT item described a factory team of about 150 people; the current company site gives 200. The FINAT report on the March 2022 opening was headlined as the company’s third factory expansion in Warsaw.

Much of the brand is shown through events and partners rather than advertising. The distributor meeting of 2022, the KURZ partnership of 2024 and the shared Domino stand at Labelexpo Europe 2025 each presented GRAFOTRONIC machines as one stage in a longer line, finishing what another company’s press or embellishment system starts.

For a design guide, GRAFOTRONIC shows how a young Swedish/Polish machine builder presents label finishing through modular product codes, connectivity language and partner showcases rather than heritage. Compare ABG and Nilpeter, two more names from label converting. For this guide we use graphite, steel grey and a deep teal on liner white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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