In early May, the Scandinavian Print Group took over the Limberg Group — several print shops in the Cologne area, with the parent company even coming out of insolvency proceedings. There was no press release from Onlineprinters about it. Yet the Scandinavian Print Group has belonged to the group since 2017, and the acquisition is even mentioned in the half-year report. Just without a name. A look at a consolidation that’s deliberately running quiet.
The news itself isn’t in dispute. Druck & Medien reported back in late May that the Danish Scandinavian Print Group was taking over the Limberg Group from entrepreneur Robert Kramer. The Meerbusch-based M&A advisory firm starkpartners, which accompanied the sale process, names Limberg-Druck GmbH as the parent company in its announcement, along with SDK Systemdruck GmbH and NetMarket PMS GmbH. Limberg-Druck GmbH was sold out of ongoing insolvency proceedings.
What’s interesting is where these companies are based. Druckhaus Süd Medien GmbH is located at Maarweg 233 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld, with Robert Kramer listed as managing director in the imprint. SDK Systemdruck Köln GmbH & Co. KG is registered at the same address. Limberg-Druck itself produces in Kaarst, in the Rhein-Kreis Neuss district. So anyone wanting to know where print capacity and customers in the Rhineland have just changed hands ends up in an industrial estate west of Cologne city centre.
Different figures are circulating on the number of companies involved. The Danish online portal Sign, Print & Pack wrote of “six print shops in the Cologne region” at the end of June, while the M&A aggregator mainsights.io referred to a network of seven companies. A complete, cross-checked set of commercial register entries is not publicly available for either figure. Four companies can be named with certainty so far:
- Limberg-Druck GmbH, Kaarst — taken over out of insolvency
- SDK Systemdruck, Cologne, Maarweg 233
- NetMarket PMS GmbH
- Druckhaus Süd Medien GmbH, Cologne, Maarweg 233 — linked via managing director Robert Kramer
On the German company list of the Scandinavian Print Group, only Limberg-Druck in Kaarst appears so far, alongside Schipplick + Winkler in Lübeck, Merkur Druck in Norderstedt and the Neustadt-based companies. The Cologne businesses are still missing from it — perhaps a sign of how fresh the integration is.
The trail leads to Neustadt an der Aisch
The Scandinavian Print Group (SPG) isn’t simply an independent Danish corporate group. Quite the opposite: it has belonged to Onlineprinters since 2017. The German entity, Scandinavian Print Group DE GmbH, is based at Rudolf-Diesel-Straße 10 in Neustadt an der Aisch — that is, at Onlineprinters’ own production address. SPG’s managing director is Esben Mols Kabell, who co-founded LaserTryk.dk in 1999. As the shareholder of the German SPG entity, North Data lists OP HoldCo GmbH as of December 2025, the holding company of the Onlineprinters group and issuer of the €225 million 2024/2029 bond. Under this holding company sit two businesses: Onlineprinters’ platform business and the Danish SPG group, whose best-known brand is Lasertryk.dk.
The clearest evidence that Onlineprinters is ultimately behind the Limberg Group acquisition, however, can be found in Onlineprinters’ own quarterly report, available on the group’s investor relations page. It refers to a group with several production sites in the Cologne/Düsseldorf area, acquired in May 2026. The description matches the Limberg transaction. The group hasn’t reported a second acquisition of this kind for the period. The report doesn’t give any concrete names.
But it does become clear what this acquisition is primarily about: “Beyond adding customer relationships, this transaction also brought additional production location into the Group and established an important strategic footprint in Western Germany, supporting further M&A activity in the region going forward.” Paraphrased, that means: customer relationships come first, production second. It also means western Germany is meant to serve as a base for further acquisitions going forward.
So anyone wanting to attribute this barely publicised takeover to the Onlineprinters group doesn’t need to click through the imprints of the various websites. The group wrote it down itself in its bond communications — just in a way that doesn’t make a headline.
Roll-up means buying customers, not machines
Which brings us to the actual subject. Onlineprinters reports in two segments, and their development makes the connections clearer. In the first half of 2026, the online segment, meaning the holding company’s platform business, generated revenue of €83.7 million, up from €82.6 million in the same period the previous year — a rise of 1.4 percent. The roll-up segment, in which the group bundles its acquisitions, jumped from €59.5 million to €73.2 million in revenue, a rise of 23.0 percent. After deducting €2.5 million in consolidation, that gives group revenue of €154.4 million. Nearly half the business, then, now runs through acquired companies.
The 2025 financial year showed the same picture, only more starkly: the online segment shrank from €168.5 million to €164.3 million, while the roll-up segment grew from €113.9 million to €128.5 million. According to its own figures, the Onlineprinters holding company completed six acquisitions in 2025, including Merkur Druck in Norderstedt and the Danish company Strandbygaard. The growth, then, comes almost entirely from the commercial register, not from the market.
Onlineprinters calls this strategy “inorganic customer acquisition” in its reports, meaning winning customers through acquisition. It’s not primarily about sheet-fed offset presses in the Rhineland, but about those clients who have so far ordered from a regional print shop and are meant to order through a platform tomorrow.
Keeping the sites? Not according to the bond report
The Druck & Medien report on the takeover stresses that customer service and project management will stay local, while IT and finance are standardised. It refers to one production site that is meant to remain as a local hub.
The Onlineprinters holding company’s quarterly report to its bondholders is clearer on this point. Translated from the English, it states: “The integration is proceeding according to plan. At its centre is the consolidation of the acquired group’s multiple sites into a single location — the group’s new central site in the Western Germany region — together with the merger of the associated companies, in order to make use of the bundled administrative structure for future acquisitions.”
Which of the businesses will become this site, and what happens to the other addresses, isn’t stated there. Anyone working on the Maarweg currently learns the direction of travel from an English-language investor document sooner than from any communication by the new owner.
It’s worth noting, incidentally, where the group is looking next. The report states: “Further acquisitions are already in preparation, with the focus once again on Northern Europe.” Cologne, then, was the entry point into a region, not the start of a buying spree in the Rhineland — at least not in the short term.
Esben Mols Kabell described the background to Sign, Print & Pack as follows: the German market still consists of numerous independent print and design businesses, and that’s exactly where the consolidation potential lies.
The Scandinavian Print Group itself grew as a group in 2025 to revenue of DKK 966 million, up from DKK 850 million the previous year, equivalent to just over €129 million, with an operating result of DKK 72.6 million, or roughly €9.7 million (exchange rate at the end of August: DKK 7.47 per euro). For 2026, the group is targeting DKK 1.1 to 1.25 billion, or €147 to 167 million. At the end of 2025, around 860 people worked for SPG across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Poland.
The parent company in Aarhus, Scandinavian Print Group A/S, had revenue of DKK 840.2 million and 334 employees in 2025, according to the Danish commercial register. It was called LASERTRYK.DK A/S until October 2017. Today, Lasertryk is the brand, no longer the company name.
Measured against group revenue of €289.8 million, the Scandinavian Print Group thus accounts, roughly, for around 45 percent of the entire Onlineprinters holding company. What’s striking is that its revenue lands almost exactly on that of the roll-up segment: €129.2 million versus €128.5 million, and in the previous year €113.7 million versus €113.9 million. The segment is therefore probably, in essence, a reflection of the Scandinavian Print Group, or so I suspect.
What this means for the market
For online printers, the message is clear: growth no longer comes from reach and price, but from acquisitions. Anyone servicing a €225 million bond, while barely growing in the core business and forecasting only single-digit revenue growth for 2026, has hardly any alternative.
This shifts the role of traditional mid-sized print shops. For a buyer like this, a company’s value lies less in its equipment than in its customer list and in the people who know those customers. For healthy businesses, that’s a succession option that barely existed ten years ago. For struggling businesses, it’s a way out of insolvency, as the Limberg-Druck example shows. Only, nobody should kid themselves: whoever sells gives up control over order processing.ichts vormachen: Wer verkauft, gibt die Hoheit über die Auftragsabwicklung ab.
My Take: Consolidation in the German print market is overdue, I’ve got nothing to say against that. What annoys me is the contradictory statements and the secretiveness. The industry is told that service stays local. Bondholders are told about the consolidation onto a single site and the merger of the companies. Both can be true. But anyone who communicates like that squanders trust, and shouldn’t be surprised when employees and customers start reading the investor report too. Dear Onlineprinters: tell the industry first.
