Turnover rose to £209.2m in the period, compared with £195.6m a year earlier, in part due to the addition of £8.7m of sales at Service Graphics, the large-format business St Ives acquired last November .

However, Service Graphics also contributed a small loss of £331,000, which St Ives put down to the traditionally quiet Christmas period.

St Ives, however, posted an overall net loss for the period of £7.3m due to a £14.4m goodwill write-off related to the sale of its corporate finance and mutual fund printing operations. In the same period last year, the group recorded an overall net profit of £8.8m.

St Ives chairman Miles Emley said: “While most markets have continued to experience overcapacity and pricing pressure, we are making significant progress in achieving our strategic objectives.

“Our increasing focus on specialist, non-commoditised markets and our Group sales initiative continue to deliver results and we expect our underlying trading performance for the year as a whole to be considerably ahead of that achieved in 2006.”