Review of 2013: February

Acquisitions, investments and insolvencies: all the action from a year in print

Xerox revealed its two new digital print engines, the Color J75 and C75… AGI-Shorewood was planning to close its Swindon site… News Corporation’s second-quarter results revealed that the legal fallout following the phone hacking scandal was continuing to cost the company significantly… In the US, the decision by the US Postal Service to end Saturday mail delivery raised concerns in the direct mail and commercial printing industries … In a bid to reduce illegal logging, the government passed legislation that required businesses dealing with timber products to keep chain of custody records… Applications for the second round of the government’s Employment Ownership Pilot training fund opened for bidding…Administrators were appointed at Alito Color Group and all 40 members of staff made redundant… Following the loss of a £10m-per-year POS contract with retailer Boots, administrators also moved in at Bezier’s Wakefield and Leicester sites as part of a restructuring of the £49m business… A fire at Mono-Poly Printers in Louth, Lincolnshire destroyed millions of pounds’ worth of kit and brought production to a standstill… Polestar gave workers at its Chromoworks facility 30 days’ notice of its closure… Garnett Dickinson appointed Carl Garnett as managing director of GD Mailing…

feb22Communisis announced the release of £20m worth of new shares to help fund growth and restructuring costs… Ashford Colour Press spent £2m on an HP T230 colour inkjet web press with inline Hunkeler Modular Glued Book Solution in a move into short-run colour book printing… ImageData Group installed the UK's first Xerox iGen3 150 at its Brighton site to extend the range of work produced… KBA announced the launch of a new sheetfed offset press, the Rapida 164, to replace the Rapida 162 and 162a models in its large format line-up… A raft of kit from the defunct Newsfax International business went under the hammer, although its high-value presses were sold separately via private treaty… MPG Books Group rebranded as MPG Printgroup and finalised its high-speed colour inkjet plans as it prepared for the arrival of the UK's first commercial installation of the HP Indigo 10000… Moo.com opened its first retail store to establish a physical presence for its online empire… Pearson announced that it was to book a £150m restructuring expense for 2013 to push online growth as Financial Times digital subscriptions overtook print circulation for the first time… Rigid Containers revealed details of a £6m expansion plan… The world’s longest B1 Heidelberg press, a 17-unit XL 106 perfector, was installed at Chesapeake’s East Kilbride plant…