2016 and all that... December

No guesses as to which story dominated the news in 2016, the 20 most read stories on printweek.com for 2016 are all about Polestar. Nevertheless there was plenty else going on, not least of all Drupa...

Harrier stepped up to help disappointed parents, children and schools after Edinburgh-based business Dynamic Colour abruptly ended its Christmas card service... Paper manufacturers revealed that prices were soon to increase by up to 10%... The outcry over the use of beef tallow in the production of the polymer £5 note caused the Bank of England to look at changing the formulation of the substrate... Former employees of Paperlinx started to receive their payments for wage arrears and holiday pay... API Group acquired Netherlands-based Amsterdam Metallized Products... Agfa and CompuGroup Medical SE ended discussions over the latter’s potential takeover bid... Closure of DMGT’s Harmsworth Didcot printing site stalled... Astley Signs acquired fellow sign manufacturer Sign of the Times... Xerox appointed long-standing employee Andrew Morrison as the first managing director of its UK and Ireland operation... Barnwell Print invested more than £1m in new equipment... Print software developer Global Graphics acquired printhead driver system specialist TTP Meteor... Sun Chemical appointed former army major and DS Smith senior manager Adam Anderson as managing director of its UK, Nordics and South African operations... Metloc Printers, the print company owned by the family of Conservative MP Stephen Metcalfe, went into administration... Apple Colour invested in a Heidelberg Versafire CV digital press, a variety of Morgana finishing kit and a Heidelberg Prinect Business Manager workflow package... Adare SEC spent around £3m on continuous-feed, high-speed colour inkjet Canon kit for the former Polestar site it acquired in the summer... DS Smith posted significant jumps in both revenue and pre-tax profit in its half-year results... North London-based digital printer Face Creative Services went into administration... Cimpress acquired pen manufacturer and customiser National Pen Company, in a deal worth nearly £160m... Heidelberg launched its new development centre project at its Wiesloch-Walldorf site... Communisis won an HMRC contract for all outbound customer communications, likely to amount to nearly 200 million letters a year... Johnston Press announced the sale of 13 East Anglia and East Midlands titles to Cambridge-based Iliffe Media for a cash sum of £17m... PrintWeek geared up for first PrintWeekLive!, being held in March 2017...