Friary has made nearly a fifth of its workforce redundant after Nature Publishing, part of Macmillan Publishing, withdrew its contract for the production of academic and medical journals.

Nineteen of Friary's 103 staff have been asked to leave after Nature decided to take the contract to a Singaporean rival who could print the work for half the price.

"In simple terms our largest contract is moving to Singapore from 1 January," said Friary's managing director John Parvin (pictured). "We were told in mid-November. We had suspected it would happen, but thought the transition would have been longer, perhaps a year."

Parvin said if he had been given more time, he could have explored other options, but the speed at which Nature pulled out of Friary had meant that job losses were inevitable.

Nature accounted for around 10% of Friary's total output, a loss that Parvin said couldn't be absorbed through other means. "The staff have been fantastic in dealing with this and have come up with all sorts of cost-saving ideas," he said. "But redundancies are unavoidable."

Parvin said that the switch of contracts to the Far East was a widespread problem in the British printing industry, particularly for academic journal printers.

"We still have 90% of our work to do," Parvin said. "It's our responsibility as directors to keep going for the 80-plus employees who remain."

Friary scored two firsts this year with its installation of a Komori LS 1040 10 colour B1 perfector in March and two KH82KL Stahl Folders in May.

Friary Press in Numbers
- Based Dorchester, Dorset

- Founded 1927

- No of staff 103

- No of redundancies 19

- 2004 turnover 8.5m

- 2004 pre-tax profit 638,000

- Operating profit 04 1m

- Operating profit 03 732,000