I've been taking a look in the rear view mirror of past experience as a way of putting the proposed closure of St Ives' Andover plant into some sort of context.

Back in 2002 when the group announced it was shutting its Gillingham facility, we at PrintWeek described it as a "clear signal that it will not accept work at any price". I imagine there will be some hollow laughs upon re-reading that phrase now. In the intervening years the ill-fated Caerphilly factory has also been closed. But St Ives has been unable to avoid the sort of unsustainable pricing that has become the norm in magazine printing.

What's different about the group, in comparison to most of its competitors, is that it has the means to bear the costs of closure too, and it doesn't come cheap: the price of shutdown at Gillingham was put at £5.7m, and Caerphilly accounted for the lion's share of a £13m restructuring charge. Such sums make is easy to see why so many factories struggle on, with losses being preferential to crystallising potentially onerous closure costs.

Andover's presses are getting on a bit, but it's a good plant and clients regularly (and universally in my experience) heap praise on the team there for outstanding quality and proactive customer service. So it must be a double blow to the workforce to see rival factories that do not deliver such benefits endure, while the Hampshire plant appears set to become the latest casualty to add to my ever-lengthening list of defunct UK publication printers.

Unfortunately Andover's leasehold site and relatively small two-press operation had put it at the top of the St Ives-specific list of "factories most likely to close next". One could also question whether ultimately the group will want to maintain two sites in the west country, but that's a debate for another day. Shutting Andover would leave the web division with three plants (I'm excluding the Kent and Yorkshire direct operations from this particular equation), and a manufacturing footprint that is evolving to match the type of work that meets the profit aspirations of the group and its shareholders.  As messages to the market go, this one couldn't be clearer.