On top of that, the value of being able to drill down into the figures to reveal exactly how your company measures against its peers in a whole raft of metrics - well beyond simple sales and profits - to key performance indicators such as sales per employee and return on capital employed makes it not just fascinating, but essential reading for anyone serious about the business of print.

Analysis: A revolution is underway

Print is in the throes of a radical shake-up that will have repercussions for years to come, reports Darryl Danielli

The fact that the sector is going though its most dramatic period of structural change since the switch from letterpress to offset lithography is hardly a surprise. However, right now it's not only advances in technology that are driving change, it's the industry itself and the way that businesses operate that are also being forced to evolve rapidly.

Historically, the sector, in terms of company size, has been a typical pyramid: a handful of larger groups at the top spreading into a broad base of small companies making up the bulk of the industry at the bottom (around 85% of UK print companies employ less than 20 staff).

However, this structure is changing to an hourglass model. Prior to 2007, this structural change was largely expected to be driven by mergers and acquisitions (M&A) among the medium-sized firms, creating more larger-sized groups, which in theory would benefit from economies of scale and be able compete more effectively in a commodity-style market.

However, while M&A activity has played its part, largely through acquisitions out of administration (there are 72 M&A deals in this year's Top 500 report, compared to 44 in 2008), what we've seen over the past 18 months is a recession-fuelled rapid acceleration of the rate of change. No regular PrintWeek reader can have missed the fact that most of the companies that have collapsed in the past 18 months appear to have been in the £3.4m to £12.5m bracket.

Even so, it's probably fair to say that the impact of the recession doesn't appear to have been fully felt by this year's rankings, largely due to the filing periods involved, but the structural change that was already underway is still clearly evident. This is amply illustrated in this year's Top 500, where the number of companies in the report that recorded sales of less than £3.4m grew by 32% to 102 companies, while the biggest fall (10%) was in the £3.4m-£12.5m turnover bracket.

At its most basic level, the fact that in this year's rankings you only needed sales of £452,000 to be included in the UK's 500 biggest print outfits, compared to £859,000 in 2008 and £1.9m in 2007 signals that the evolution is truly underway.

The fact that the turnover figure required to be considered one of the UK's largest printing companies has virtually halved every year for the past three years is another frightening statistic and illustrates just how fast the industry is changing.

On the bright side, it appears that the smaller companies have had a positive impact on the average profit margin of the Top 500, with companies with sales of less than £2.5m typically notching up a 4% pre-tax profit margin - by far the highest of any of the turnover categories - proving that it really can pay to be small.

TOP 500 2009
This year’s Top 500 supplement is only being mailed to subscribers of PrintWeek and the principals of the Top 500 companies. If you would like to buy a copy of the 68pp state of the nation report, produced with the help of leading accountancy firm Grant Thornton, please email diana.jones@haymarket.com or call 44 (0)20 8267 4373. Each report costs £50. Alternatively, for a limited period, it can be obtained free-of-charge by subscribing to PrintWeek for a special-offer rate of £89. For more information on subscribing call 08451 557355 (quoting ref: Top 500).