YRG said it hoped the deal, which completed on Friday (1 April), would allow it to expand its share of the corrugated market.

The group is headquartered in York and also has sites in Cottingham, near Hull, and Dublin. YRG managing director Mark Gration, said: “Spera will complement YRG’s existing business model perfectly.

“Both companies share a focus on customer service, and the additional expertise, resource, and platemaking capacity that Spera offer will aid our future growth and benefit our customers.”

Spera’s three sites, in Dublin, Lurgan (Northern Ireland) and Heanor (England), will be taken on by YRG and all staff retained, said Gration.

“Nobody’s going - we’re only expanding,” he explained.

Spera’s Dublin site will likely be included in YRG Ireland, and its Lurgan Site rebranded as YRG Northern Ireland. With the acquisition of Spera, YRG will have eight sites globally.

One of the attractive synergies of the deal was that both firms work in predominantly Esko environments, although YRG hinted that it would look to reequip Spera so that its technologies also mirrored its other plants.

Paul Vaughan, managing director of Spera, said the acquisition had put Spera on the fast track to technologies and opportunities it would not have previously had access to.

YRG’s progress in automation, he said, and its experience in narrow-web and flexible packaging, would be complemented by Spera’s own experience in the corrugated market.

He said: “It seems like a win-win for us both. We can give them some of our know-how, they give us some of their ready-made know-how as well.

“I’m exceptionally excited about this.”

Vaughan added that YRG’s acquisition meant a huge amount of job security for the Irish firm at a time when many similar organisations are making redundancies.

He said: “In the market, they are the only big UK trade house that has actively invested and reinvested in this island.

“An awful lot of our competitors [instead] sell into Ireland from afar, from some super-site somewhere in the UK.”