Tangent de-listed from AIM in April after a management team together with majority shareholder Michael Green fought off a rival bid from Writtle Holdings and took the group private in a £11.91m deal backed by Green’s Portland Investment Management.
The new devolved structure involves Printed.com founder Nick Green heading up the largest part of the group, comprising online print portal Printed.com and estate agent marketing print specialist Ravensworth, with operations in London and Newcastle.
Bespoke digital print wing T/OD (Tangent On Demand) in London continues to be run by Andy Davis, while Michael Green’s son Oliver Green is running the Tangent Snowball digital marketing agency, also based in London.
Tangent’s former chief executive Tim Green is now working at Portland Investment Management, while Tangent chief financial officer Jamie Beaumont has left the business.
Nick Green said: “All our operations are now structured as individual businesses and run as separate entities. I have a complete focus on the printed side.”
A revamp of the Printed.com website is in process, with a prototype of the new site in the test phase. It will involve Printed.com’s own API (application programming interface).
“Customers will be able to call off individual components and use them in their own APIs,” Green explained. “The new features are all around growing our customers’ businesses, giving them a completely new way to shop and buy designs.”
The new site is set to go live in Q1 2017.
“This year has involved an exceptionally hard amount of work building a new fully-mobile site with new features. It will be the bedrock of the business for the next few years,” Green added.
Printed.com has also started to work with a selection of partners to produce jobs that fall outside its own digital printing speciality. Green said around 10% of its work was not digitally printed.
Separately, the final set of results for the old Tangent Communications group have also been filed. Sales in the year to 29 February 2016 were flat at £26.2m, but underlying operating profits slumped by nearly 65% to £413,000.
The firm posted a £659,000 bottom line loss after making a £1.1m write-down in the carrying value of its software assets, and a £285,000 charge for costs relating to the takeover bids made for the business.
It had net cash at the year-end of £2.04m (2015: £1.88m).
Green said he was now targeting sales of circa £17.6m for Printed.com: “It’s a reset. When I look at the next 12 months this business [Printed.com] is absolutely on track to be profitable and growing and I think the other parts of Tangent will be as well.”
