Ottignies, Belgium and New Bedford, Massachusetts (USA) - C.P. Bourg the world's leading technology developer and supplier of document feeding, binding and finishing equipment, announced today that it has reached a major milestone in the company's history with the celebration of its 50th anniversary as The Print Finishing Experts.

When Christian-Pierre Bourg founded C.P. Bourg s.a./n.v. on December 15, 1960, he built the fledgling company on experience and a vision that led to the development of a document collator unlike any other and which established the man and the company as the industry innovator.

Directed from European headquarters in Ottignies, Belgium, the C.P. Bourg companies today include subsidiaries in France, Germany and Luxembourg in Europe, and C.P. Bourg Inc., the company's U.S. headquarters founded in 1977 in New Bedford, Massachusetts and which serves as its base of operations in North and South America.

The companies together operate three manufacturing facilities on two continents representing more than 510,000 square feet (47,380 square meters) of manufacturing space. They also employ more than 600 professionals dedicated to supporting more than 40,000 customers worldwide and an array of strategic partners that include many of the world's leading manufacturers and suppliers of printing and related equipment.

Christian-Pierre Bourg, who has served as company CEO and leader for the past 50 years, starts his sixth decade supported by management and engineering teams in Belgium and the United States.

Despite the C.P. Bourg companies' growth in size and stature over the past five decades, product development continues to be based on Mr. Bourg's three pillars of Quality, Innovation, and Efficiency core principles that still guide the company today.

The quality, innovation, and many efficiencies built into C.P. Bourg binding and finishing systems have resulted in products enabling their users to operate better, faster and more economically, to generate higher profits, and to produce a faster return on their capital investments.

Adhering to these principles also has helped the C.P. Bourg companies win more than 20 prestigious international business, product and technology awards from business and industry associations and strategic partners for its many achievements and contributions to binding and finishing.

"More change in the last 50 years than the previous 500"
Commenting on the significance of his company's 50th anniversary, Mr. Bourg said, "It is humbling to have been part of this vibrant industry for half a century. The world of graphic arts has probably been through more change in the last fifty years than in the previous five hundred. We have seen letterpress displaced by offset and now offset being displaced by digital. The world is a more connected place and the internet has transformed the old ways of working with print. Nowadays we build equipment that can handle the 'run of one' and systems that can communicate seamlessly from the front end to the mail-box and that can be set up and monitored remotely."

Mr. Bourg continued, "When I first established this company, I set the guiding principles of the business as Quality, Innovation and Efficiency. In those early days it meant being imaginative and creative and producing the best quality equipment to bring the best possible return on investment to our customers. Fifty years on, none of those principles has changed -- the only difference today is that we provide, with our partners, integrated systems that meet the needs of our customers for end-to-end solutions that can be fully integrated into their workflow and management information systems.

"We look forward to continuing to meet the needs of our customers for the next fifty years and beyond, and to managing the demands of a constantly changing business environment," Mr. Bourg concluded.