Prinovis has appointed CBRE to sell the freehold facility, which involves a massive 58,268sqm factory on a 50-acre site – providing room for potential expansion – at the Estuary Business Park in Speke.
CBRE described it as “Liverpool City Region’s premier location for manufacturing and logistics, particularly within the pharmaceutical and car manufacturing industries, as well as retail distribution”.
“Site specifications include up to 18.4 MVA, delivered via 6.5 MVA coming in from the grid, with an additional 10.6 MVA available via the site’s own Combined Heat & Power (CHP) facility, plus 5,000 roof mounted UV panels producing 1.3 megawatts. The asset also benefits from a significant provision in gas and water supply.”
Prinovis UK managing director Richard Gray said the managed shutdown, announced last November due to the declining gravure market and spiralling costs, “has gone as well as we could possibly have hoped”.
“We have fulfilled all our client obligations and set out to make sure it was an orderly shutdown, with all the staff looked after.”
Gray said that most of the site’s remaining equipment had been sold, with a few pieces yet to be finalised.
Its Goss M600 16pp web press with Kodak inkjet heads is going to Germany, but not to another Bertelsmann print site.
Some remaining Muller Martini and Sitma equipment is heading to the US. The gravure presses will be scrapped. A quantity of Ferag kit is still up for sale.
News UK and Bauer are the site’s last remaining weekly clients. The News UK work is in the process of transitioning to Walstead.
Gray will remain in post after production stops with a small team to handle the rest of wind-down and legal formalities.
“We’ve got a team staying to do the decommissioning of the site and various other things to do with an orderly shutdown, including the extraction of the equipment and taking the site back to a saleable condition to maximise the value.”
The land and buildings have a book value of £11.8m on the Prinovis accounts for 2021, after a £43.2m depreciation charge made in that period.
In 2021 its sales were down 13% to £46.1m, and the operating loss was nearly £6.5m.
