Managing director of Solopress Simon Cooper has taken on the larger mantle as managing director of Onlineprinters, the German arm of the group.
The extension of responsibilities follows a shake up of responsibilities across the leadership of the group to prepare for a significant growth in revenue over the next three or four years.
At the end of last year the contract for CEO Roland Keppler was not renewed. This allowed the business to examine the roles and strategy that was needed in collaboration with the McKinsey group, leading to CFO Sascha Krines to become CEO.
The group will operate in two parts – the Scandinavian centred business which operates from sites in Poland, a small unit in Stockholm and the former LaserTryk operation in Denmark. This has grown through a series of roll up acquisitions across Scandinavia that have added brands and brought work to the production operations. This is being run by Esben Mols Kabell as managing director. The plan is to extend this modus operandi across northern Europe to feed the Poland and Denmark factories.
Solopress and Onlineprinters follow a different business model, based on online ordering, making it natural to operate these companies in tandem says Cooper. Solopress has grown rapidly in recent years, recovering quickly from Covid and thrusting Cooper into prominence. This has taken sales at Solopress to around €50 million, still well behind the €150 million that Onlineprinters generates from a significantly larger operation.
This is located at Neustadt an der Aisch, close to Nuremberg, where the company has a fleet of B1 Speedmasters, perfecting and single sided, HP Indigos and large format inkjet presses. Solopress has a similar production platform, having started to move from B2 to B1 litho presses.
The two businesses, however, operate with a different technology stack. There are no plans to force a change, the future however is likely to lead closer collaboration. As CEO Krines says: “We want to share our knowledge and utilise important developments in the field of software technology jointly and in a resource efficient manner. By integrating ground-breaking innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), we want to stay ahead of the competition and further optimise the customer experience.”
Cooper will split his time between the two sites, spending three weeks a month in Germany, flying from Stansted to Nuremberg. He is also taking German lessons to improve communications he says.
