"Sour grapes are always difficult to deal with.

"The comments are ludicrous and disingenuous – the facts are Pindar lost its largest customer to an American printer who undercut them and offered new investment. 

"Polestar weren’t even involved in this tender.  The reason we attracted investment and they didn’t is that Polestar’s underlying operating cash flow and operating margins are good, Pindar’s weren’t – end of!

"However, he’s absolutely right that the whole industry has suffered from price falls and the industry has been too weak to counter pricing pressure from over supplied capacity. 

"No one company has had the ability to counter this, it has been an industry wide problem, not only in the UK but across Europe. 

"Thankfully this situation is changing with strong price increases in gravure and high end offset which are needed to counter an onslaught of cost increases.

"The fact is we never considered Pindar as a competitor, except in a small area of our market: 16pp at Chromoworks. 

"In fact the reverse is true, because Pindar offered, in some cases, a superior finishing capability on 16pp - we could not get close to the price on many opportunities that Pindar were involved with.  So to blame Polestar for their ills is quite ridiculous."