Ian Smith took up his new role as managing director of Walstead Peterborough yesterday (13 December).
He takes over from Mike Newbould, who had been running the site for the past 16 months.
Printweek understands Newbould has left the group to pursue a new opportunity.
Smith has wide ranging industry experience. He was co-owner at Gloucester print firm Severn until 2020.
Prior to that he was chief operating officer at CPI Group UK.
In the earlier part of his career prior to that he also worked at St Ives, where he ran the Peterborough factory at one time.
“We had spoken to Ian who was looking for a new role, and it all just happened to fit really well. He’s off and running,” said Walstead Group COO Roy Kingston.
Separately, Paul Toms is now running the Walstead Bicester site after Lindsay Atkinson left the business in October.
Toms had been running Walstead Roche in Cornwall, and also had a wider brief as UK performance director.
“Paul is running Bicester with operational assistance from Steve Marshall and the two of them are doing a fine job,” Kingston added.
Walstead Group has just completed the mammoth annual task of the Christmas double-issue TV magazines, which went on sale earlier this week.
“It’s the first time we’ve produced all the listings with all the newspaper supplements that we do now as well, so there wasn’t much margin for error.
“The whole lot were collected on time, I think it was around four million copies in total.”
Posting on LinkedIn about the Radio Times Christmas issue, Immediate Media production director Koli Pickersgill said: “After 10 days of frantic production & manufacturing activity, our special Christmas double issue is safely out on shelves!
“A gargantuan effort from my amazing production team working with all our partners in print, distribution and mailing. Huge thanks goes to Walstead UK, Frontline Logistics and Westcolour for supporting us through this crazy period.”
She quipped “Now, where’s that highlighter pen?”
Kingston said the group had deployed some of its continental capacity to handle the additional workload involved in producing all the titles, with some production carried out at Gotha Druck in Germany, which it acquired over the summer.
