BUSINESS FORMS PRINTER
Mark Cornford, managing director, Integrity Print
"Commodity manufacturing only becomes a trap when you can’t make any money while producing it. At Integrity, we embrace commodity print and through our broad manufacturing capability and lean enterprise culture, we are able to make a decent return. Having said that, we constantly strive to strengthen our margins through adding value to our basic print offering, providing web finishing, pressure seal,integrated cards, security products and transactional print and mail. As with all things in life, it’s about getting the balance right."

TRADE BODY
Sidney Bobb, chairman, BAPC
"The issue with the print industry and the commodity market is that once a printer is in the commodity trap, it is very hard for it to get out. Many printers simply don’t seem to have faith in the fact that they – and print – provide a great deal of service to their customers. Printing does enhance a company’s business, and it can provide many benefits such as bringing in work and effective marketing. Printers need to be better at selling that and how print can help its customers become more profitable."

DIGITAL PRINTER
Paul Manning,
sales director,
Printflow
"We’ve always been a fairly diverse company. That’s not to say we are a jack-of-all-trades but we have never left ourselves overexposed to one particular market. No client accounts for more than 5% of our turnover and no sector makes up more than 10%. Like many, our public sector work declined last year, but to counter that, we introduced more auxiliary services to balance things out. For instance, when the demand for mono manuals declined, we invested in CD duplicators, which is where much of the demand was moving to. This year we will be no different and we will use the flexibility of our digital and litho presses to broaden our output further."

PRINT FINISHER
Richard Anstock, managing director, Nottingham Print Finishers
"We can’t avoid the commodity market, we have to manage the amount of commodity work we bring in with the more oddball jobs. Unique jobs bring better profit margins, but there aren’t enough of those to service the business. We couldn’t sustain ourselves on those jobs alone and if we did try to we would be a much smaller operation, so when the bigger oddball jobs came along we wouldn’t be able to take them on anyway. Our overheads are covered by the commodity work, but we try wherever possible to go after unusual work, where we can charge a more realistic price. It is all about weighing up our options and taking on the most cost-effective jobs."