2016 and all that... October

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...

Staff at Menzies voted to accept the improved pay offer and called off two, one-day strikes... RR Donnelley completed its three-way split... GH Smith & Sons celebrated 150 years in operation... Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) hinted that further rationalisation could be on the cards, upping its group-wide reorganisation spend from £15m to £50m... HM Printers filed an extraordinary resolution to wind up, citing bad debts in an “increasingly cut-throat and treacherous trade”... A fire broke out at the abandoned Polestar Petty building in Leeds... There was also a fire at the premises of Palm Paper... J&G Environmental won contracts to provide waste removal services for Graphic Packaging International and YM Group... Agfa was proposing to close its Italian plate factory... Cepac planned to invest around £1m on extending its premises and increasing the size of its digital operation... Your Print Partner invested £1.5m in new premises and a raft of new kit... Pureprint Group revealed it was to open a new client service office in New York, its first outside the UK... Hague Print bought accountancy forms supplier Custom Forms... Fujitsu, which operates a large managed print services division in Merseyside among its other UK businesses, said it was to axe more than 10% of its employees nationwide... Houseprint Ltd was placed into compulsory liquidation. A few days later, Claren Print, a company owed more than £12,000 by Houseprint, also went into liquidation... Adare Secure Essential Communications won a major contract with retailer N Brown Group, in what was described as a “multi-year, multimillion-pound win”... Fuller Davies purchased a B1 five-colour Speedmaster CX 102... Almost 900 of the industry’s finest celebrated the industry’s best at the PrintWeek Awards ceremony... Saica Group signed an agreement to acquire Irish packaging business Americk Packaging... Central Mailing Services won a £10m three-year contract to deliver a range of services for Oxford University... Mimaki’s European subsidiary completed a deal to acquire Italian manufacturer La Meccanica... Writtle’s interims revealed that the group had more than £6m in cash to aid its expansion plans, boosted by the sale of Creo in June... Atlas Packaging invested more than £1.75m in a bespoke flexo press... An old Farley letterpress proofing press fetched an astonishing £4,118 after a bidding war on eBay... Apogee acquired Direct Business Systems... Agfa was in early stage talks about a possible purchase by German medical IT group CompuGroup Medical SE... Heidelberg named Rainer Hundsdörfer, a newcomer to the industry, its new chief executive...