Reports in The Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times state that the deal with Trinity, which is set to be finalised later this week, will lead it to abandon the Manroland Colorman presses that were installed at its Manchester and Stratford printing houses as part of an £80m spend in 2005. According to its annual report last year, it still owes Lloyds Bank £33.7m on hire purchase agreements for the presses.
The £80m investment also included the purchase of mailroom inserting and stitching equipment from Ferag, Agfa pre-press equipment and a Schur automated palletisation system.
Rumours emerged at the start of the year that Guardian Media Group (GMG), which publishes The Guardian and its Sunday sister paper The Observer, was considering outsourcing its printing, but that it would be Rupert Murdoch’s News UK that would take on the work, a move that would have caused an editorial clash with the Guardian's left-leaning outlook.
Instead it appears that Trinity Mirror, which publishes the Daily Mirror along with numerous regional titles, will take on the work. The Telegraph reported that Trinity won the work ahead of News UK and also Johnston Press, which prints The Guardian in Northern Ireland.
Trinity has closed printing sites at Cardiff and Newcastle in the past 18 months and it is unclear at the moment which of its five other printing sites – Watford, Birmingham, Teesside, Cardonald (Glasgow) and Oldham – would take on the work.
GMG is initiating a number of cost-cutting measures to help it recover a £37.8m operating loss and break even within two years, although it has firmly ruled out ditching its print product altogether. Only two years ago, it established a standalone print-focused unit in a major reorganisation of its commercial operations.
The Guardian's print circulation has more than halved in the past decade, with the most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) setting daily circulation at 154,010.
In its annual results published earlier this year, Trinity Mirror announced a sales boost of more than £100m, which was in the main put down to Trinity’s acquisition of rival publisher Local World.
When contacted by PrintWeek, both GMG and Trinity Mirror declined to comment.
