Print has always been a business with its fair share of takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, some sparking controversy. Forty years ago, in 1981, Robert Maxwell acquired the British Printing Corporation, an almost dead group of old fashioned print businesses scattered about the country. The business was on the brink of collapse so creditors, especially those that had lent it money, were happy to see Maxwell take over.
He soon became the most flamboyant man in UK print as he sought to reorganise an under invested organisation into a modern web offset led group. He would fly in by helicopter, ignored the normal conventions in terms of negotiations with trade unions, telling staff to accept his terms or be laid off, and ran some impenetrable shareholding structures. The key to his interest in print was that he had realised that many of the group’s businesses occupied freehold sites in the centre of towns and these were ripe for redevelopment.
Consolidation might mean selling off these lucrative sites, sometimes including social and sports facilities for staff, and moving to industrial estates on the edge of the towns and cities. The businesses shed overheads, acquired modern factories and modern equipment and the shareholders gained from the sale of that property.
Maxwell was not the only businessman to spot the property opportunity. Others created groups that brought together prepress businesses, again combining forces perhaps on a new less central site freeing up properties in and around Clerkenwell at a time when industry was moving away from what had been the heart of print in London.
John Clegg, the young CEO at the head of Wace, said that this was about modernising what had been a craft led village industry. It was. But it was also about many other things, only some of which have been publicised.
At the same time the acceptable face of creating a modern print group was Bob Gavron, head of St Ives. St Ives had started in the mid 1960s and by the early 1980s was a collection of small print businesses in the London area working for publishers. Then came the opportunity to buy Severn Valley Press, owned by one of those publishers at the time and needing to be rescued. That the business was in Caerphilly was second to the contracts that came with a successful takeover.
Then came the acquisition of Chase Web Offset, a dynamic group run by Max Harvey, another flamboyant character and sales director Quentin Jones.
At its peak St Ives produced a good chunk of the UK’s quality monthly titles (BPCC concentrated on high volume weeklies), owned Burrup Mathleson, the oldest of the City printers and was owner of Clays, still the largest single-site book printer in the UK. BPCC had minimal City print work but did own Hazell, Watson & Viney as a substantial book printer sitting on a site on the edge of Aylesbury that has long been a housing estate.
City print was a must have for ambitious print groups at a time of privatisation and the Big Bang in finance markets. Another of the web offset groups Hunterprint acquired a small City printer in the Old Street area called Metcalfe Cooper. It grew rapidly and moved out to Hackney Wick.
When Hunterprint was acquired by hungry Canadian owned Quebecor in the 1990s, Metcalfe Cooper was bought by its management and eventually moved, as Park Communications, from what was to be the Olympic Park down to Beckton.
When IPC owner Reed International wanted to shed Odhams, it had turned to Maxwell, selling him the business in 1982. When it wanted to shed its last magazine printer Chapel River Press in Andover, became the new owner. It also bolted on Varnicoat as a gravure printer, cheque printing as well as commercial print. The name continues even with a completely different shape to the business.
The British Printing and Publishing Corporation went through various guises under Maxwell as he added the Daily Mirror newspapers to the business (again from Reed) and set about becoming a newspaper baron, investing heavily in web offset newspaper printing as national newspapers moved away from Fleet Street during the decade.
However, with the pressures closing in, the printing business was sold to a management team for north of £300 million. Thus began a series of refinancing arrangements, changes of name, ownership and management until Polestar eventually foundered.
Others believed that big is best at the time, and built groups. Norton Opax was a Yorkshire business that acquired Broadprint in Altrincham (because every group needed capacity to print direct mail), Waddingtons from Leeds expanded into security documents with the acquisition of Chorley & Pickersgill, later to become Communisis and only last year to be no more.
Robert Maxwell was a major shareholder in Norton Opax and a bid for McCorquodales was referred to the Monopolies Commission before being allowed. It did not stop Norton Opax trying to buy De La Rue in 1989 and in turn Bowater attempted to buy Norton Opax and won the day. Those were the days when print was important.
Another Leeds based operation Jarvis Porter collected a label group until it acquired Wace Corporate Packaging which was a step too far. Four label print operations ended up being sold to CCL Industries.
In the 1990s merger and acquisition activity continued, often with an international flavour. RR Donnelley was the largest US printer and it had operations outside North America, including Ben Johnson in York and a City print operation so that financial documents could be published simultaneously in New York and London, perhaps also Frankfurt and Tokyo for that matter.
Then out of Canada comes Quebecor with ambitions to expand in Europe. It acquired the Hunterprint business in the UK and with it contracts to print newspaper supplements, notably for Associated Newspapers. In France it bought the Jean Didier group, which like Hunterprint had built a greenfield factory, and it took a substantial stake in a Polish printer. It was not to last and Quebecor lost the confidence of its investors, have bitten off more than it could chew buying World Color in the US. It retreated from Europe.
Smaller scale businesses also grew. Mike Taylor was frequently in the headlines as Fulmar Colour attracted a number of four-colour commercial printers at a time when the world could not get enough of four-colour litho printing. Fulmar moved into a ‘print city’ in Beddington near Croydon with ample room to expand. It acquired, among others, Pegasus Litho along the road in Mitcham and the Royle Group, a printer just off the City Road that had a strong reputation for printing annual report and accounts. These were the prestige products of the time, involving metallics, varnishes and several passes through the press on some very nice papers. It was of course pre internet and alternative ways of distributing financial information.
Fulmar also set up a book printing business, bare to the bone in terms of staffing, using computer to plate and automated binding lines. This gave it an advantage over the more traditional printers in the country. It also provided a reason to buy the business, which CPI Books did.
CPI was the result of a smart Paris educated businessman Timothy Bovard realising that by acquiring book printing businesses across Europe, economies of scale would result, that work might be shared among the group and publishers with interests in multiple countries could be well served. CPI bought Bath Press, Cox & Wyman, Anthony Rowe, and Mackays as well as Fulmar’s Bookmarque business.
Another graduate of the top Paris business schools, Robert Keane had a similar inspiration at the turn of the millennium, realising that online printing was going to become a big business. He started Vistaprint in the US, brought it to Europe and embarked on an acquisitions spree over the last decade that has included Tradeprint in the UK.
The same idea is driving the buying spree behind the expansion of All4Labels and Asteria. The goal is to create label printing groups consolidating small businesses into a sizeable group able to work for multinational brands and offering a network of printers able to supply the local sites that the brands have without excessive shipping costs.
This imperative may spark a round of purchases in the carton sector. The sector is already mature in this respect. Field Cartons as a UK owned business, combined with Boxmore, before US group Chesapeake stepped in to buy Field in 1999. A dozen years later Chesapeake became part of MPS, a deal driven by the private equity owners of both businesses. Since then the MPS business has been acquired by WestRock which last year agreed a merger with Smurfit Kappa. There is surely space for a smaller, regional packaging group to emerge in Europe.
Acquisitions continue, though now driven by consolidation opportunities rather than growth as was the case 40 years ago. Walstead is currently the prime driver, looking for opportunities around Europe. This has included UK acquisitions, Benham Goodhead and more recently York Mailing Group.
Walstead has been able to be selective in buying large volume web offset printers because there are few other, if any, buyers. There is a rapidly reducing demand for long print runs, large web offset capacity can be something of an albatross. In the UK Walstead has been able to pick up assets from the York Mailing Group to become the only game in town for volume web offset printing in this country thanks to these acquisitions.
Strategic imperatives are also behind modern acquisitions. Pureprint, for example, acquired Imprint to expand its services to include large format and then Pixl as a company creating content for retailers and major brands that the group also prints for. It is not averse to a tactical acquisition, adding the sales teams from Pepper Communications and both sales and rigid box making from Screaming Colour.
Cross border deals are occurring in labels and cartons, less so in commercial printing, but we have seen Graphius from Belgium buying Park Communications and Elcograf from Italy buying Clays.
Onlineprinters, a German online printer, has acquired Solopress and earlier Cimpress had bought Tradeprint, both deals driven by a need to expand international online print businesses. Other cross border acquisitions in this sector have been frozen by the pandemic and the economic aftermath.
Currently the other European online printers have focused within the EU rather than plunge into the admittedly sizeable UK market but which is one outside the EU block. That might change. But so too might UK businesses as they look for growth. When Precision, Prime and Proco came together one objective was to create a £100 million turnover group. That can only be possible through acquisitions. Other sizeable companies will need acquisitions to find substantial growth in this industry. Print will therefore remain addicted to acquisitions for some time yet.
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