The decision to cease trading was made towards the end of April and it closed its doors on 29 April. The company has applied for liquidation and a meeting of creditors will take place on 18 May, at which point a liquidator will be appointed. All 35 staff have been made redundant.
According to Andrew Kelsall, business recovery partner at Larking Gowen, which is dealing with Colchester, it is anticipated it will go into liquidation on 18 May and from there it will begin selling off its assets.
In November 2014, Colchester announced it would become an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) with staff taking a majority stake in the business. Kelsall said the company's employee ownership status had nothing to do with the decision to cease trading.
Former managing director Phillip Colchester said: "Despite recent events, we have no regrets in transferring the business into employee ownership, because it is a great business model that improves staff motivation and we saw a lot of that."
Colchester, who became managing director in 1984, said the redundant staff were due to be paid by the Redundancy Payments Office and a "good number" have already found employment.
Colchester Print was founded in 1976. It acquired Morton Hall Press in 1999 and purchased assets from Manns Printers in the mid-2000s. At its pinnacle in 2005 it had turnover of £5.2m and over 90 staff. It provided litho and digital printing and finishing services.
He added: “When you look at it, we were profitable until 2009 but we never recovered from the effects of the recession. The problems are rooted back at that stage. The marketplace has conspired against us. You can have all the enthusiasm and passion in the world but if you don’t have enough sales coming through the numbers just don’t add up.”
In November 2015, Colchester set a budget to just break even, but sales were too low. In the past few months of trading, order levels dropped to approximately 30% of their normal level.
Colchester believed the right thing to do for the company at this point was to “put its hands up” and volunteer as opposed to waiting to see if things improved.
Kelsall said: “The directors asked we meet and they formed the view that company was going to be unable to continue to trade and that it would not have sufficient funds from trading to meet its creditors and wages.
“It is a very competitive market and the time between getting work in and actually having it come in was too short. You may only know a month in advance. It had got to the point where it could not see that it had sufficient funds to pay staff and creditors.”
