In an unexpected move, Garnett Dickinson Print managing director Andrew Barker resigned and left the £44m turnover print and publishing group. Barker had worked at the group for more than 11 years... St Ives acquired digital marketing agency Realise Holdings bolstering its expanding family of marketing subsidiaries. St Ives agreed to buy Realise for the initial sum of £21.7m plus a further £18.3m payable dependent on Realise achieving certain growth targets... Precision Printing invested around £200,000 in a Scodix S75 digital enhancement press in order to be able to offer added-value effects that boost the "stand out" impact of print... Kodak announced that it was to close its Leeds plate manufacturing facility, with the loss of about 210 jobs. Production was expected to cease in mid- to late-2015. Seperately, the company later announced the appointment of Jeff Clarke as its new chief executive. Clarke pledged to be “open, accountable and collaborative” in the role. Kodak continued to make progress in its first set of results since exiting Chapter 11 in September 2013, with improved margins and reduced losses offset by the fact the company was performing below target... A Cardiff printer was ordered to repay £135,000 for VAT fraud or serve 32 weeks in prison. Andrew Robert Allen admitted submitting false invoices to HMRC generating a total VAT loss of around £145,000...

Greetings card giant Hallmark UK announced that it was to outsource its printing and manufacturing operations, then based in Dawson Lane, Bradford, with the potential loss of up to 300 jobs... Polestar has received a £10,000 fine for health and safety failings after a 55-year-old employee at the printer’s Petty site in Whitehall Road, Leeds, had part of his finger sliced off while using a machine... Stephens & George took delivery of a new Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106 eight-colour perfector, which comprised the first half of a £6.5m investment... Heidelberg chief executive Gerold Linzbach made the first major changes to the firm’s senior management team since joining the business in 2012...  Global MP has secured a fresh £7.5m working capital facility from Centric Commercial Finance. Chief executive Kevin Dunstall said the firm’s previous funding line was “insufficient to support the scale of our planned acquisition programme”... PrintWeek, Fujifilm, Intelligent Finishing Solutions and Ipex organiser Informa joined forces to produce the IpexDaily show newspaper live in the halls in a unique demonstration of web-fed inkjet magazine production... Domino Printing Sciences announced plans to build a new manufacturing facility after acquiring 20 acres of land adjacent to its head office in Bar Hill, Cambridge... Weedon Group spent £1m on an Enko ES2200 large-format die-cutter and a corrugator upgrade to support its expansion into the high-end retail-ready packaging market... Union Unite warned that Royal Mail's announcement that it would cut 1,600 jobs as part of an ongoing efficiency drive could spark industrial action... KBA posted a 2013 operating loss of €130.7m (£109.4m), compared to a 2012 profit of €13.7m (£11.5m), citing costs related to its Fit@All restructuring programme as well as substantial decline in web and special presses demand... The new-look Ipex was hailed a success by organiser Informa and exhibitors alike, with the latter group achieving significant sales at the six-day London event, despite visitor numbers dropping by more than 50% from the previous show...