Belgian print group Graphius has acquired Cassochrome, one of the country’s leading high quality printers with a global customer base among galleries and art publishers.
The move has meant the closure of Cassochrome’s factory in Waregem and the move of production of Graphius in Ghent. This will make better use of assets particularly the Graphius bookbinding expertise.
The Cassochrome name is being retained and the team continues to be led by Laurence Soens. Graphius CEO Denis Geers says: “The acquisition of Cassochrome is a move that follows careful deliberation and one will broaden our presence in the art sector. Indeed, the company has an established reputation for producing high quality art books for an international clientele. The company has a lot of know-how with regard to exactly this sort of reproduction with the use of an incredibly fine digital dot pattern. We will be able to deploy this on a larger scale.”
It follows the acquisition of Park Communications in the UK in June last year. In both cases there was a long courtship before completion of the deal. And it is built on being able to offer book publishers production capacity so they have no need to place work in the Far East.
The acquisition of Cassochrome follows too on the back of challenges in the high end book sector: Kingsbury Press has changed hands while Push Print in London and Boss Print have closed.
Soens says: “The alliance between Graphius and Cassochrome will prove essential in the long term for our employees, our customers and our suppliers. The need for a high performance in-house bookbindery for our book productions is greater than ever before. We have been talking to the Geers family for a while and have built a relationship of trust in that time. The cultures of Graphius and Cassochrome are very closely aligned, both attaching value to their various stakeholders.”
Graphius has also appointed Geert Gielen as general manager for Ghent. His background with the De Jong group with a spread of services from sheetfed to web offset and gravure printing.
