The Eurohueco facility is located near to Barcelona in Spain, and forms the Walstead Iberia business alongside sister web offset plant Rotocobrhi near Madrid.
Debbie Read, who took on an expanded remit including Iberia in September as CEO of Walstead Western Europe, announced that a consultation process had begun with workforce representatives last week.
Walstead’s intention is to “initiate a workforce restructuring process which subject to consultation could lead to large scale redundancy”.
Eurohueco operates from a 40,000sqm site that has 22,500sqm of factory space across two plants.
Walstead diversified the site’s offering four years ago with the installation of a Manroland Goss Lithoman IIIS short-grain web press, which came from liquidated Körner Druck in Germany, and involved a €4m (£3.5m) spend at the time.
The plant ran four 2.7m-wide gravure presses.
In its statement announcing the restructure, Walstead cited shrinking demand in the European gravure market – particularly in Eurohueco’s key markets of Spain and France.
“Despite recent efforts and substantial investments made at Eurohueco, including the purchase of two web presses and two sheetfed machines, the additional volumes produced on these machines have not been sufficient to mitigate the substantial reduction in the company’s gravure printing volumes,” the group stated.
Read said the decision had involved a great deal of consideration and the potential loss of jobs was much regretted.
“However, the web offset and gravure printing sector, in Europe and particularly in Spain, continues to face significant structural issues and the ongoing reduction in capacity across the industry is expected to continue.
“We are determined to restructure Walstead Iberia to ensure that it remains competitive and can continue to provide a sustainable service to our customers.”
Sources on the continent said they had been told that the whole plant was likely to close in early February, but Walstead had not confirmed this, nor the number of employees involved in the restructuring, at the time of writing.
The group said it would endeavour to minimise the impact of the restructuring on employment, and clients would be contacted regarding “potential solutions and recommendations”.
Walstead is looking to expand in other areas due to decline in its core long-run printing markets for products such as magazines, catalogues and supermarket flyers.
In its results for calendar year 2023 net sales, excluding paper, were down 3.5% at €378.1m (£317m). Adjusted EBITDA fell by 17% to €34.8m and the group made an operating loss of €800,000, compared to a €13.9m operating profit the prior year.
The group expanded into Spain, and added gravure printing, nearly a decade ago when it bought the Be Printers Spanish operations from Bertelsmann.
