BGP chief executive David Holland warned that the company would be "optimising its fill" – a euphemism for ditching its worst-performing contracts – last November and he has proven true to his word.
BGP isn’t the first to make a stand in the sector, but it is the first of the remaining players to openly turn down work and the noises coming from its competitors are that the market has reached a tipping point.
Interestingly, Walstead has been in discussion with some of the major publishers on the rises in input costs the print industry has experienced in the past few years. Which presumably went down like the proverbial balloon you’d expect it to given an audience that will only ever have known prices to go one way.
Like it or not though, buyers, the web offset market is the same as any other and as such the old rule of supply and demand applies. For too long, supply has outweighed demand so dramatically that it has been a buyers’ paradise. However, with the pendulum finally swinging the other way, the prospect of price rises becomes inevitable.
Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, there’s no gain without pain, and Polestar’s Barry Hibbert’s prediction that 10-15 web presses across the sector will be mothballed in the next year will sound ominous to the employees of the industry’s older printing sites.
Simon Nias is news editor of PrintWeek
Look out publishers, web is finally standing up for itself
BGP's decision to take (probably) its first stand on price, has resulted not only in Future packing its mags for the West Midlands, but also sparked a quiet revolution in the web offset market. Whisper it softly, but the next time you hear about price rises, it might just be the printers that are instigating them.
