Flint has sold the Xsys flexo plate business in a carve out that allows the remainder of the group to focus on digital and packaging inks.
The sale leaves Xsys as a business with flexo and letterpress plates, the imaging units that were part of Xeikon, sleeves and adapters used by label and flexible packaging printers. Flint produces a broad range of inks, covering commercial, publication and packaging markets, platesetters and the Xeikon digital print operation, itself split across labels, pouches and most recently inkjet printed corrugated boxes. The company has the No1 or No2 position in most of the markets it serves, flexo plates being an exception.
Lone Star Opportunity Funds is the new owner for Xsys, paying an undisclosed sum for the $300 million sales business. Donald Quintin, president of the private equity business which has been strong in the property sector, says: “We look forward to working with Xsys, a leading global provider of printing solutions.
“We recognise not only the resilience of the Xsys business and the diversity of its offerings, but its growth prospects as well. We appreciate the value that Xsys provides its many customers, and have great confidence in the management team’s commitment to realising Xsys’s potential in the years ahead.”
That growth may be reliant on acquisition. While the offset plates market has consolidated to three major suppliers, there is a wider spread of flexo plate providers, including Miraclon, which was a carve out from Kodak in 2019. While MacDermid has announced plans to invest in a new plate production line in the UK in recent weeks, and the overall market for packaging is increasing, a question hangs over flexo printed flexible packaging because of the plastic based substrates it prints on and the rise of digital printing.
Substrate suppliers, converters and retailers are working hard to develop alternatives to the multi-layered films in widespread use and to put in place robust recovery and recycling networks. And digital printing has yet to bite as deeply into packaging markets as it has in commercial print.
The sales means a shift in senior management. Flint Group chief operating officer Steve Dryden becomes CEO while Antoine Fady becomes CEO of Xsys. Dagmar Schmidt is its COO and Martin Sauer, CFO. The corporate head office will be in Germany. Fady says the deal “will further enable the Xsys business to advance as a standalone, best in class, full solutions provider to the flexographic and letterpress pre press industries, with tailor made solutions developed for each market segment and customer type. We look forward to working with Lone Star, whose experience and track record will be of great benefit as we move Xsys forward in this next phase.”
If flexible packaging has proved slow to adopt digital printing, this is not the case for the narrow web area where both inkjet and toner printing continue to increase market share at the expense of letterpress and flexo.
