In January of this year, a KBA Rapida 105 press went into production at the Dauir Printing House in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan. The four-colour press is equipped for commercial printing and outputs up to 16,000 sheets per hour.

Dauir was founded back in 1932, then under the name Printing House No. 2. During the Soviet era, the company printed over 3,000 different newspaper titles and books in high-volume runs. The sheetfed department was already then a domain of “vista blue” presses from Saxony.  

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the company was privatised. As chance would have it, Dauir – whose name translates as “our times” – was acquired by a group of investors headed by Svetlana Nazarbayeva, sister-in-law of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The building was renovated from the ground up, and the machinery base was modernised. In fact, a new printing press or downstream finishing machine was purchased almost every year.  

Today, Dauir counts a workforce of almost 600 employees, many of whom have studied at the Moscow Institute of Printing. The product portfolio centres around illustrated books, encyclopaedias and popular literature. For the past 12 years, textbooks for all levels of education – from pre-school to university – have also become standard products, together with a diversity of materials for the further training of teachers and lecturers.  

A publishing subsidiary Kitap was founded in 2003, not least to better coordinate the publishing of school textbooks, as well as scientific literature from the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and world history. Further activities embrace a wide range of poetry and fiction, alongside some 60 newspaper titles.  

A year ago, in January 2016, KBA president Claus Bolza-Schünemann visited the company and prepared the ground for the latest investment. After a break of over 25 years, during which several printing presses were purchased from other German and Japanese manufacturers, the Dauir Printing House has now once more taken delivery of a press “Made in Saxony”.