Tectonic plates shifting in web offset

08 December 2008

Printer's Devil

A month ago I was musing about the future shape of the UK web offset sector, in particular the magazine printing specialists. With the change of ownership at Cooper Clegg, and now Wyndeham, and the accompanying restructuring at those two firms it's clear that major change is indeed afoot and things aren't just going to carry on as they were. What's more, Polestar has engineered a further refinancing that means its balance sheet won't be such a basket case anymore. Incredible, really.

We know that Cooper Clegg is downsizing to approximately half its previous size, and Wyndeham Heron intends to shut down a press and significant bindery capacity as part of a radical restructuring plan that involves shedding a third of its staff.

For a sector where the most commonly heard gripes are "overcapacity" and "sub-economic pricing", what I'm trying to work out is whether these actions are likely to result in a better supply/demand balance that will make the web offset business in general more viable, or is it mere tinkering at the edges? Will the strength of the euro (and indeed increased corporate and consumer focus on carbon footprints) mean that titles such as IPC's Marie Claire will return to these shores?

A year or so ago while contemplating this same supply/demand issues, and the prospect (shock!) that web offset prices could even go up, I made a list of web and gravure publication printers that had hit the buffers since the turn of the century. I've added it below, including a couple of subsequent casualties. Looking at it makes me realise what massive structural changes there have been already, and how tricky the supply/demand equation was even before the economic meltdown.

Now magazine paginations are going down, some titles have already closed, and more will no doubt fail over the coming months. Yet new presses continue to come on-stream. At BGP in Bicester there's an enormous amount of new, high-pagination web capacity. The KBA Compacta from Quebecor World Corby has just been installed at Polestar Chantry. Is this list going to get longer? Surely it's inevitable that it will.