London repro firms join forces

Neighbouring London-based pre-press firms Classified Central Media (CCM) and Camden Town Typesetter (CTT) have merged to form CC Media Group.

The deal, which was completed at the end of July this year, saw the last of CTT’s team of 10 staff move into CCM’s premises in Islington last month to join the firm’s 32-strong team.

Currently the 2012 PPA pre-media company of the year CCM offers traditional repro as well as digital services, specialising in web content data for magazine publishers such as IPC, Macmillan Group, Reed Business Information and United Business Media.

According to CCM managing director Mike Harrington, CTT’s pre-press offering of services including pdf creation, flight checking, typesetting, image manipulation and correction is a "perfect fit" for the new company.

"We are old rivals who have known each other for 20 years," he explained. "Being only a few miles apart we realised that it made sense for us to offer each other business continuity so, for example, if either had a power cut we could share resources to maintain an uninterrupted service to the publishers. This idea grew from there."

CCM’s three directors and CTT’s joint managing directors each hold a 20% stake in the new £2m turnover company taking the roles of production director, IT director, finance director and two managing directors.

Joint managing director Mike Harrington said that by combining resources the companies could achieve greater economies of scale. "The merger affords both companies greater resilience with CTT’s technologies and our extensive data handling and database management experience," he added.

"As CTT’s lease expired in October it was perfect timing and we are achieving far lower production costs by working together at the same time as offering a broader range of services as a combined entity."

Harrington said that as well as a recent £25,000 investment to boost the capacity of CC Media Group’s production workflow, the firm would also upgrade its Mac desktop hardware across the company over the coming weeks.