Leicester-headquartered Opus Trust acquired Adare SEC and its Nottingham, Huddersfield and Redditch sites in November. The business said the site’s client activity and operational capacity will now be migrated to the Park Mill site in Huddersfield.
Since completing the acquisition, Opus Trust said it had reviewed plans to bring its various business units together to ensure that the group operates from an efficient cost base and delivers a service strategy that focuses on service excellence for clients.
Opus Trust chief executive Tony Strong said: “This decision is necessary to ensure our business is in the best possible position to face the challenges and opportunities the market presents in the years to come.
“It is important to stress that this in no way reflects the operational performance of the site or the service delivered for our clients. It is vital that we continue to review our operating model in line with volume demand to ensure we are operating optimally and in line with strategic objectives, whilst delivering cost efficiencies that enable us to offer our clients best-in-market pricing.
“Following such a review of operating locations and footprint across Opus Trust Communications and its subsidiary companies, we are proposing to reduce the number of sites from which we currently produce transactional communications from four to three.”
He added: “Whilst there were no immediate redundancies as a result of the November acquisition, our strategic decision to exit our Nottingham site regretfully means a number of operational and support roles are now at risk of redundancy, subject to a period of consultation with all impacted employees.
“These consultations will take place over the course of 2022. It is our intention to ensure a seamless migration of all client work into our Huddersfield site and as such, we have a dedicated task force in place to manage this process. We will be providing regular communication to all clients impacted by this change to ensure they remain updated as we successfully migrate work between our sites.”
64 people work at the Nottingham site but as consultations are ongoing, the business could not say at this time how many of these jobs are at risk.
In 2017, production work from the operation that Adare SEC had at the time in Guildford and a “small number” of its staff were relocated to Nottingham. Adare took on the Nottingham site when it acquired Polestar Applied Solutions in 2016, giving itself a base in the East Midlands for the first time.
Opus Trust Communications became a £110m-turnover, 530-staff business after acquiring Adare SEC from its prior private equity owner Endless.
In Adare SEC's accounts for the year ended 31 October 2020, which have recently been filed at Companies House, the business reported a turnover of £58.6m, down from £71.4m in 2019, and made a pre-tax loss of £1.55m.
The Adare SEC deal followed Opus Trust’s acquisitions of Critiqom in 2019 and DocCentrics in 2020.
