Headley Brothers is seeking a white knight to rescue the 135-year-old business in Ashford, Kent. The company has appointed Smith & Williamson to manage a sale process that could lead to a prepack administration if a willing buyer can be found.
The company has specialised in short to medium run magazines across business to business publishers, special interest magazines and independent publishers. However, many of these have been looking for alternative printing arrangements as service suffered after the business took on printing of weekly supplements for Express Newspapers with print runs of 500,000, following the collapse of Polestar.
This strained both the web offset printing firepower, comprising a 24pp Goss Sunday 2000 and a five-unit M600, and its binding capacity. A leaky roof in September was blamed for damaging work in progress which meant that production was delayed for smaller customers, further encouraging them to look elsewhere.
Suppliers have become reluctant to extend credit terms, despite a new cashflow funding arrangement late last year. This has culminated in the decision to sell the business just months after Simon Bingham took full ownership of the business. He had joined the company as finance director in 2007 and became managing director of Headley Brothers in February 2014.
Headley Brothers dates back to 1881 and has been in the hands of the Pitt family for most of those years. However, Roger Pitt, fifth generation of the family, stepped away from the business in June last year following Jon Pitt out the door. It was after this that the company took on the cash generative but capacity hungry supplement contract.
An earlier round of redundancies two years ago had failed to restore the company’s fortunes, while the shareholders in the business seemed reluctant to agree the new investment that the business has needed.
As well as the web presses, the company operates three 12-unit CutStar Heidelberg SM102 sheetfed presses. As print runs have dropped, the makeready times needed on these machines has reduced their competitiveness.
Even so the company has reported sales of £19 million for the last set of filed accounts. The latest set are marked as overdue.
Headley Brothers operates from an extensive site close to the centre of Ashford. Part of its car park and adjacent land has been earmarked as suitable for residential development by Ashford council.
The M600 installed at Headleys in 2012 is one of the most recent installations of a 16pp web press, but it was not new. It replaced two ageing Heidelberg Web16s and came from a printer in central Europe to Kent.
