The Bookseller.com

4th July 2009

Printing chaos after B&T collapse

30.04.08 Jo Young

The closure this week of Butler and Tanner, the largest colour printing firm left in the UK, has left publishers scrambling to meet print deadlines.

Publishers expressed concern that agreed printing schedules may not be met, but all agreed that the problem would have been far worse in the busier second half of the year.

“This is really very sad, for lots of reasons, not least on a practical and economic level with the Euro being as strong as it is. It gives even fewer options to publishers to print domestically,” said a spokesman for Bloomsbury.

“We have been affected by this, but not a huge amount because it’s not peak season. If it had happened any later it would have been catastrophic,” said the production manager of one publisher, who asked not to be named.

MPI chairman Mike Dolan, who said that the company was “doing its utmost” to complete all the printing work in progress, conceded that the closure was a major blow for domestic printing. “There are no other printers in the UK that could handle the production that Butler and Tanner could, so it will all now shift, mostly to Europe,” he said.

Dolan said that the company did not have a great many books in printing production at the time of closure, which he attributed largely to Unite’s industrial action announcement last month and a subsequent drop in demand from publishers. “Our ‘forward loading’ list diminished by 90% in less than a month, from a value of £2.5m in April to £250,000 last week, and that formed part of our decision to pull the plug,” he said.

The Somerset-based business went into voluntary liquidation last weekend, with the loss of 300 jobs. Butler and Tanner’s parent company, private equity investors Media & Print Investments (MPI), decided to close the company in response to planned industrial action by the union Unite. The company, currently operating on a skeleton staff, said it is now “facilitating” publishers in cancelling their orders and shifting production to printing firms in Europe.

MPI also gave its assurance that none of Butler and Tanner’s creditors will be left out of pocket. In a statement, it said: “Based on professional valuations, the directors believe the value of Butler and Tanner’s assets far exceed its liabilities and they anticipate that following an orderly liquidation of the assets, all creditors will be paid in full and MPI will recover some or possibly all of its investment.” 

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