In 1967, Arthur Southway OBE addressed the Royal Society of Arts on the subject of print machinery manufacturing. "It is estimated that the total production of British printing machinery is running at a level of £50m," he said. "Of which probably 40% is exported, with some firms exporting as much as 70%-80% of their output."
In today’s money, that £50m is the equivalent of more than £650m. The scale of UK print kit manufacturing in those days was, therefore, enormous. Indeed, Southway points out in his speech that at the upcoming Drupa 1967, Britain would be the largest exhibitor after Germany.
Among the exhibitors of that era were the great names of print’s past: Crabtree, Crosfield, Dawson Payne & Elliot, Baker Perkins, Harris, Morgan and Strachan Henshaw, to name but a handful.
Unfortunately, those heady days have passed and the UK sector has inevitably shrunk, with many of the companies mentioned consigned to the archives lovingly tended at the St Bride Printing Library, or to tribute websites such as those featuring Wharfedale maker Dawson Payne & Elliot (www.otley.co.uk/museum/principle.htm) and Baker Perkins (www.bphs.net).
However, that’s not to say British printing equipment innovation is dead – quite the contrary is true. In some cases it can even be described as thriving. It’s worth celebrating the fact that we still have global players of considerable scale – such as Domino with a turnover of £256m and sales in 120 countries; along with smaller players that punch above their weight on the worldwide stage, an example being £1.5m-turnover Tech-ni-Fold.
Britain is also home to a venerable name that has survived wars and technological revolution – Timsons, established in Kettering in 1896, is a company that moved into printing equipment via the somewhat unusual route of shoe machinery and single-speed motorcycles – yet it remains a world leader in book printing machinery today.
Exporting Britishness
For a company like Timsons, exports account for the vast majority of sales because it can literally count the number of potential UK customers for its core product on the fingers of one hand – although this may change if its move into digital finishing add-ons for high-volume inkjet presses pays off.
Other British manufacturers competing in the more general print market would like to see a bit more evidence of patriotic appreciation among potential customers.
"We try and promote the fact we’re British and I’d like to think that people do consider that if they buy something British they are also helping the economy, but I’m not sure they care," observes Morgana managing director Quen Baum. "If we’re not the cheapest then very often they won’t consider it. It’s very disappointing when people buy a foreign machine just because it’s 10% less."
In Southway’s concluding remarks 43 years ago, he stated: "The achievements of the UK industry show that we have much to be proud of, but pride in past achievements does not and will not make us complacent about the future."
The modern counterparts of the companies feted by Southway are certainly under no illusions about the challenging environment they operate in, not least the pressures from overseas competitors in low-cost economies, but pride and passion in their achievements is as strong as ever, as Tech-ni-Fold managing director Graham Harris points out: "There’s nothing that feels better than designing something from scratch and seeing it made and sold all over the world. Some of the products coming out of the UK are the best in the world and you’ve got to admire that."
THE BEST OF BRITISH PRINT EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING
AUTOBOND
Autobond managing director John Gilmore is one of the biggest characters in British print – many at Ipex were lucky enough to taste the sausages made out of the pigs reared on his farm near his Heanor site in Derbyshire.
Founded in 1978 by Gilmore’s father, the company manufactures laminating kit such as the hugely popular Mini 76 TH and the firm’s latest product, the Mini 36 SUV, a machine with inkjet printheads that digitally prints drop-on-demand spot UV varnish inline on to matt film. Gilmore explains that, after 32 years, the company remains both a British and a family affair.
"Two of my sons now work with the company – one in the US and one in the UK – as well as my wife, brother, sister, two brother-in-laws, and nephew, so it’s truly a family business. We’re very proud to be a British company and have installed equipment in more than 160 countries."
With an £8m turnover and 30 employees, Autobond is a real UK success story and with a keen eye on R&D, Gilmore aims to keep it that way. "We’ve always invested heavily in R&D and there are lots of exciting developments taking place, in particular the launch of the spot UV varnish system, which takes us into a new area," he says.
CASLON
It’s one of the most famous names in print and it’s still going strong almost 300 years after it was created by its founder, William Caslon. He was an engraver of firearms in the West Midlands who moved to London to start a career in type design. Caslon created a typeface for the New Testament in Arabic (Caslon Old Face was also used to print the American Declaration of Independence in 1776) and was the first to cast moveable metal type in the UK. The company moved on from its early roots (and from its original east London home to a new site in St Albans), forced in large part by the move from letterpress to litho, according to Richard Caslon, descendant of William and current managing director (another descendant, Roy, is company chairman). "We had to find other areas of expertise that we could excel in," explains Caslon.
"Ancillary finishing and niche market machinery proved very successful for us and we have still retained this focus as litho is giving way to the digital forms of printing."
In addition to selling card cutters, foiling machines, engraved stationery (die stamping) products and finishing equipment, Caslon also markets ThermoType’s foiling machines and slitters and Adana letterpress machines, a company it bought in 1987.
While Caslon says that the company markets itself as a British manufacturer, he admits that making machinery in the UK is no longer easy or the most profitable exercise.
"We design and finish the equipment here, but a majority of the manufacturing is done for us in South East Asia. Unless we can change the mindset in the UK we will find it hard to bring manufacturing back here successfully."
DOMINO
The company was founded in 1978 by Graham Minto, an engineer who had developed a continuous inkjet printing product at high-tech research centre Cambridge Consultants. Minto’s technology became the bedrock of a business that has grown rapidly since its flotation in 1985, with a 2009 turnover of £256m. While today the company may work on a different scale – thousands of workers are employed globally as opposed to the original handful at the company’s site in Cambridge – the ethos remains the same: pushing the boundaries of inkjet technology and innovation through continual investment in R&D.
Current managing director Nigel Bond, who joined the company in 1987, says that R&D expenditure for the current year could be up by as much as 30% on the previous year, but he points to two other factors that sets the company apart from its competitors: "The quality of our product range and the high quality of support and service that we offer our customers."
Bond says that Domino doesn’t overtly market itself as a British manufacturer – it’s a global business and its biggest market is no longer the UK – but he sees the country as being a strong player in terms of its R&D capability and the technical strength of its workforce. As a result, Bond says that the company has put itself on a sound footing for the years ahead.
"We’re very optimistic about the future of the company, which has grown every year since its formation – it’s never gone backwards. We’ve got a very strong balance sheet and, financially, we’re very secure."
FFEI
This firm’s fortunes reflect that of British industry as a whole. FFEI is the current incarnation of print icon Crosfield Electronics, which began in the back bedroom of founder John Crosfield (incidentally, the grandson of the founder of Cadbury’s) in 1947. It became a global print technology colossus at the leading edge of many of the technological revolutions that rocked the industry, including register control, colour scanning and electronic page composition with brands including Autotron and Magnascan.
It was somewhat undone by the advent of desktop publishing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Over the years, Crosfield was also tossed about on the seas of global corporate strategy, being owned by De La Rue from 1974, held as a joint venture by DuPont and Fujifilm from 1989, and then a solely owned part of Fujfilm during the 1990s, from where the current name FFEI (Fujifilm Electronic Imaging) derives. Since 2006, when it was it was bought in an MBO led by current managing director Andy Cook, it has been an independent firm, although it still supplies Fujifilm with products, including its XMF workflow.
Current products embrace CTP, workflow and inkjet, while its core image processing heritage is now deployed in medical imaging applications.
INCA
The company was spun-off from Cambridge Consultants at Drupa 2000, and last month at Fespa 2010 in Munich, it celebrated its 10th birthday.
Taking piezo inkjet technology – initially fellow British print technology champion and Cambridge Consultants spin-off Xaar’s – and melding it with UV-cured ink and a flatbed printing system suitable for rigid materials, Inca produced the first large-format digital machine that could compete with screen printing.
A canny tie-up with screenprint ink specialist Sericol – another British firm, although now subsumed in Japanese giant Fujifilm – gave Inca access to the right market via the right channel.
Following on from its first product, the Eagle 44, came a succession of machines that were bigger, faster, higher-resolution or lower-cost that expanded the market and applications for digital flatbed printing, further eating into the screenprint market, but also providing a range of industrial-strength workhorses for purely digital jobs. A decade on and its Onset S70 still holds the crown for the most productive flatbed machine around.
Halfway through its life, in 2005, the firm was snapped up by Japanese print technology firm Dainippon Screen, but it remains as an independent entity in Cambridge suburb Cherry Hinton. Although best known for its flatbeds, it also developed the Dotrix, a web-fed UV-inkjet machine that is now part of the Agfa stable.
MEECH INTERNATIONAL
With staff scattered across the world, Meech International is truly a global company, but it continues to base itself in Whitney, Oxfordshire, where it employs 28 people.
Established in 1907, Meech specialises in electrostatic control solutions and was the very first specialist manufacturer of static control equipment in the world to be approved as an ISO 9000 registered company.
The applications for its products span industries, but it is its web cleaning technologies such as ShearClean, a non-contact web cleaning system, that have appealed to printers.
"We’ve used our experience and knowledge in the fields of electrostatic control, air technology and web cleaning to provide solutions to a very wide range of industries," says chief executive Chris Francis. "These technologies are designed to improve the productivity of existing production lines or processes and as virtually everyone today is seeking to achieve just that, it’s a very exciting area to be in."
The company picked up The Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade in 2009 and continues to supply the world from its UK base. "We’re extremely proud to be a British manufacturer," adds Francis.
MORGANA
Morgana is now into its fourth decade of operation, having been founded in 1978. The £13m-turnover, 90-employee company operates from a new £4m headquarters building in Milton Keynes, which has allowed it to bring all its operations under one roof.
The company has established itself as a leader in the field of digital print finishing and has forged partnerships with major players including HP, Xerox, Konica Minolta, Kodak and Xeikon. More than 80% of its products are exported, mostly to Western Europe and the US, although managing director Quen Baum is also looking to grow sales in Asia-Pacific and South America. Its bestselling Digifold product, which combines creasing and folding, is now in its third iteration.
"We have to put our innovation into products that are more complicated, because once something is mainstream it becomes nigh on impossible to compete with low-cost economies," he states. "The UK is an expensive place to manufacture and our cost of labour is high, so we have to design machines on that basis," Baum explains. "All the parts come from local suppliers in a 20-30 mile radius, so we have total control over the machines."
"We really do pride ourselves on the quality," adds Baum. "A lot of our machines undergo a whole day of testing before they go out to the customer. We want people to realise they are getting a quality product."
ROLLEM
This Sheffield-based finishing equipment company has been around for more than 80 years producing systems for playing cards, business cards, greeting cards and many other digital and litho products.
Its bestselling Jetstream product has recently been given an update, which was launched at Ipex, to become the Jetstream II, a one-stop shop for slitting, trimming, perforating, scoring and collating. The £2.5m-turnover firm employs 37 staff and exports around 85% of its produce.
Managing director Stuart Murphy says: "I believe that the British flag still accounts for a great deal around the globe in terms of quality and value for money. It’s certainly one that we are proud to be associated with. "He adds that the secret to Rollem’s enduring success is its years of experience.
"With more than 80 years of designing, building and installing bespoke finishing systems for the graphic arts market behind us, Rollem is one of the world leaders in this field," he says. Along with the JetStream update, the firm also used Ipex to launch Speedset Tooling, aimed at speeding up changeovers, and its latest SetStream unit, which offers inline multi-numbering, perforating and edge gluing.
TECH-NI-FOLD
One of, if not the youngest, among Britain’s present-day success stories is Leicester-based Tech-ni-Fold, which celebrated its first decade of operation last year.
The brainchild of former print finisher Graham Harris, the firm’s Tri-Creaser unit, a device that fits to existing folding machines and provides a superior creasing result, has proved a worldwide success with an incredible 55,000 sold. When Harris first set the business up in 1999, he contemplated setting up his own in-house manufacturing facilities too, but soon realised the company was better off working with existing local specialists.
"It took us eight attempts to find the right people, but we’ve been working with the same engineering firm since 1999," he recalls. "We wouldn’t move it outside the UK. Four overseas companies have tried to copy us and the products have been very poor. On the face of it, it looks like it should be simple to replicate, but it’s anything but. Our engineering partners are used to making things with the same tight tolerances as aircraft components."
The firm employs eight staff and has sales of around £1.5m. Its bestseller is the Tri-Creaser Fast Fit, while at Ipex the firm targeted the burgeoning digital market by launching a range of new desktop creasing machines, a move that is presenting Harris and his team with a fresh sourcing challenge. "We’d love to find a British manufacturer to work with us on these too," he says.
TIMSONS
Family-owned Timsons celebrated its centenary in 1996, yet current managing director Jeff Ward is only the fourth person to head the firm and the first non-family member to take the role. But Ward is no newcomer to the business, having joined as a 16-year-old apprentice in 1979, and his elevation is in line with the family ethos at the company.
The cyclical nature of Timsons’ core book printing market means turnover can vary from £10m-£20m, "a big swing", as Ward puts it, so the 165 employee company has learned to flex its operations accordingly. The company even has its own foundry, viewed as an essential part of the business because it uses so much cast iron in each press. The foundry also provides it with a sub-contracting sideline in third-party castings beyond its own requirements.
"We are a minnow in graphic arts compared to the likes of Heidelberg and KBA, but we do everything ourselves from R&D, mechanical and electrical design, to the foundry, and assembly. You can see it all in a day here," Ward explains. "There will be some things that are beyond our capacity or ability, but typically 70% will be done in-house."
The question consuming Ward and his team is where and how Timsons, which is synonymous with its T-series book presses, can position itself for the future.
"We are involved with a lot of development projects for lab-based equipment, and we are quite attractive to universities looking for government funding in partnership with industry – the Welsh Centre for Printing & Coating has one of our four-colour flexo presses."
The firm is pushing its T-Flex flexo model for flexible packaging and printed electronics applications. And Timsons is also busy embracing digital printing technology, with its T-Book solution for perfect binding, a system that is already in use at CPI’s HP T300 inkjet web installation in France.
"The T-Book will be a family of formats based around slitting web widths and superimposing them to create book blocks," Ward explains. "The output streams are variable depending on the web widths. When we were developing it, we made a decision to look to the future with a notional 40in web width and speed of 1,000 feet per minute, even though the market was 30in wide and 400 feet per minute at the time.
"There’s a secondary market for sewn products, so we are looking at folded solutions rather than collated – can we take out the collating process in the bindery?" Ward adds. "With digital to some extent you have to forget everything you know and look at how things can be done instead."
Precisely how digital printing will impact upon Timsons’ core business is not yet clear, but Ward has adopted a ‘you’ve got to be in it to win it’ viewpoint.
VACUUMATIC
Colchester-based Vacuumatic is a truly global player, but despite opening offices in the US and Germany, it has maintained its headquarters in Britain since it was established in 1951. The £7m-turnover company manufactures paper counting machines and is a world leader in technological developments in this sector. Its Pin-&-Blade, Rotary Disc, Optical and Tabbing machines are all developed and manufactured in-house and are supplied to clients in the security and commercial print sectors, as well as paper mills and converters.
Justin Lewis, sales and marketing director at the 60-staff company, explains: "Vacuumatic has been manufacturing counting machines in Britain for almost 60 years. We are extremely proud to advertise this heritage to our distributors and clients throughout the world. We are the only manufacturer that can offer four distinct counting technologies to suit the varied demands of security and commercial printers, and the paper manufacturing industry."
The top seller at present is the latest Vicount 3 (single-head counting) machine, but other popular options include the Super 30 (twin-head counting) and the Tab Inserter Systems. Most of these machines go to non-UK markets, according to Lewis.
"The majority of our production is exported, particularly to currency production facilities within Europe and the US. We estimate that at least 75% of all the banknotes in the world are counted on our machines."
WATKISS AUTOMATION
Chris and Barbara Watkiss, printers who had come from a technical illustration background, founded the company in 1974. Unable to find a suitable collator to handle complex technical manuals that included fold-out illustrations and tab cards, they designed their own. Initially, five machines were built from wood, for use in their printing business. However, the market potential soon became apparent and so Watkiss Automation was formed.
This rotary collator went on to appear on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World programme and received a British Design Award in 1979. According to the company’s communications director, Jo Watkiss, "People often express surprise when they hear that we manufacture in the UK – there is a general perception that nothing is made in this country anymore, which of course isn’t the case. Some products are well suited to mass production overseas where low labour costs make it viable –but this won’t last forever."
Its Vario collator, launched in 1991, earned the company its first Queen’s Award for Export (1994) and innovation within the company looks set to continue. "We have a clear roadmap for product development over the next 10 years. Also we know that there is huge untapped potential for our products in the digital print market," says Watkiss.
In The Sunday Times’ International Track 100, a league table of the private UK companies with the fastest growing international sales, published on 10 July, Watkiss ranked 71.
XAAR
Xaar is the second of a trio of spin-offs from Cambridge Consultants in the inkjet business, the first being Domino, and the third Inca (see separate entries on both).
When Xaar was formed in 1990, it had a bunch of patents covering piezo inkjet and set about licensing the technology. At that time, piezo was an upstart technology – continuous inkjet was already used in applications such as coding and marking, high-speed document imaging and high-end proofing and art reproduction; while thermal inkjet from the likes of HP and Canon was making inroads on the desktop.
Now, 20 years later, piezo, the technology it backed, is dominant in most markets including wide-format industrial, narrow-web label and high-speed continuous feed. A shift from licensing technology to manufacturing more of its own heads led to the construction of a factory in Huntingdon, not too far from its Cambridge HQ, where its latest 1001 products are built. These are beginning to deliver on their promise of improved robustness, speed and quality, paving the way for single-pass printing and greatly simplified inkjet printers.
Floated in 1997, Xaar remains listed and independent, while overseas rivals have been snapped up by imaging giants such as Fujifilm and HP. This leaves Xaar in a strong position to offer open technology to those giants’ rivals. Beyond graphics the firm has got its eye on the use of inkjet technology for the micro-deposition of fluids for industrial applications such as printed electronics.
