£5.5m-turnover Kingsdown’s acquisition of Burleigh, which had a turnover of around £1m, was completed on 3 October.
Burleigh will remain based at its current 700sqm unit, which it owns. Its site is around 11 miles away from Kingsdown’s 2,800sqm premises. The firm operated digital kit, which was surplus to requirements for Kingsdown and was sold on.
Of Burleigh’s 16 staff, nine will remain based at the Portishead site, three have left the business and its four production staff have moved across to Kingsdown, to join the 54 employees already working at that site.
Kingsdown managing director David Spencer told PrintWeek: “We’re looking at whatever ways we can to grow the business and we approached what we thought was a likely candidate in the area.
“We’ve been trying to get into what we call marketing services solutions for three or four years but we’ve never quite made the leap for whatever reason.
“Now we’ve got a fully focused business concentrating purely on that, and they get access to print capacity that they just couldn’t compete with.
“We’re running our machines 24/7 while they were running single shifts on one machine. They couldn’t compete on large jobs and were turning them away.”
He added: “All production will now be done at our site and they will manage projects, web-to-print, variable data and design.
“The acquisition is working very well at the moment as we’re very well aligned.”
Burleigh managing director Greg Corrigan, who will continue to head up Burleigh with sales and marketing director Fraser Ebbs, has joined Kingsdown’s board of directors while Spencer now represents Kingsdown on the board of directors at Burleigh.
Corrigan said: “We are delighted with the deal. It allows us to fully focus on our value added offering and gives our customers access to Kingsdown’s highly competitive production facility.”
Kingsdown’s new RMGT press, which was supplied by Apex Digital Graphics, will be delivered on 13 December and up and running by mid-January.
“The drivers for the press investment are mainly cost savings and efficiencies and we need the capacity if we’re going to go down this route of bolting on acquisitions,” said Spencer.
“It will make us a lot more competitive on larger-run work. It means we can do the work of two presses on one and problems we had before with perfecting are virtually eliminated with the LED UV.”
Kingsdown, which also runs two B2 Heidelberg Speedmasters, a 10-colour and a five-colour, plus a range of digital kit, has also recently purchased a Kodak Magnus Q800 platesetter. Its clients include print management firms, blue-chip companies and a range of other medium-sized to large businesses.
