Records tumble at Speke’s £130m printing mega-plant

May 7 2008 by Alistair Houghton, Liverpool Daily Post

Alistair Houghton meets RICHARD GRAY, managing director of Prinovis

IT’S only when Richard Gray starts reeling off the statistics that you can truly understand the scale of print giant Prinovis’s investment in Liverpool.

The German group’s £130m plant in Speke, which first opened in 2006 and is now fully operational, is one of the city’s biggest-ever inward investment projects.

It uses gravure printing to produce large volumes of glossy, high-quality publications and catalogues. Print runs range from as small as 250,000 copies to those that run into many millions.

From magazines such as OK! to national newspaper supplements or catalogues for major retailers, the chances are you’ll have had your hands or eyes on a Prinovis product within the last few days.

The plant now employs 430 people and its presses are rolling 24 hours a day.

Managing director Gray, who has spent his career in the printing industry, joined Prinovis last September and has steered it through the final phase of its launch period.

He says that telling the story of the plant in statistics is the only way to get an impression of just how huge it is – and the numbers are staggering.

Gray is proud the plant boasts the largest presses of their type in the world – there are only seven TR12s on the planet and three of them are based in Speke.

Each of the presses takes a seven-tonne roll of paper that is 4.32m wide – and up to 15km long.

Gray said: “Paper goes at 16m a second through the press.

“To give an example of what we can do flat out, in a single 12-hour shift I’ve seen a net output of 1.3m copies.

“We use between 13,500 and 14,000 tonnes of paper a month.”

The plant’s rotary trimming line can trim up to 1m publications in a 12-hour shift, while its saddle-stitching line, which stitches together magazines and catalogues made up of several different sections, can stitch 334,000 copies in one shift.

Prinovis prints for its Speke near-neighbour Littlewoods Shop Direct, and has produced catalogues for companies from Argos to Wilkinson and Woolworths. Prinovis, which also has five plants in Germany, is a joint venture company with three German partner businesses – communications and finance group Arvato, newspaper and magazine publisher Axel Springer and magazine publisher Gruner+Jahr.

Arvato and Gruner+Jahr are part of the huge Bertelsmann media empire, whose other companies range from Random House to Sony BMG.

The Liverpool print plant project was launched in 2004 by Arvato, which felt the UK market was ripe for expansion as more than 65% of gravure printing for the domestic market was printed in Europe.

The project, which won £7m of backing from the Department of Trade and Industry’s Industrial Development Unit, and was supported by UK Trade & Investment, was taken on by Prinovis when that company was formed the following year.

Gray says Speke was chosen ahead of other potential sites in South Wales and West Yorkshire because of the success of the city’s regeneration, its good transport links and the amount of empty land available – Prinovis’s 63,000sq m plant sits in a huge 50-acre site with more room available for future development.

Liverpool’s history as a major printing centre also helped Prinovis find suitable staff.

Building work began in 2005 and the first press rolled a year later. Since then, other parts of the plant have come on stream and the complex is now fully operational.

Prinovis Liverpool also boasts its own combined heat and power station. Its gas turbines produce electricity as a byproduct – their main purpose is to produce steam for drying paper.

That steam is also used to clean filters inside the presses so Prinovis can recover all the solvent it uses in its production process.

Gray is proud of his plant’s green credentials, saying companies like his have a “moral responsibility” to minimise their impact on the environment.

That energy and resource efficiency can also help the company reduce the impact of rising costs. But despite those measures, Gray admits that rising raw material costs are hitting Prinovis.

He said: “Like every other manufacturing business, we have some pretty significant challenges in the UK right now.

“The worldwide energy market has a significant impact on the cost of production. We are efficient in our use of energy, but it’s a significant cost to us.

“We’re massively impacted by the rising cost of fuel, with the amount of tonnage we’re talking about in paper and in finished products.

“Equally, the pound-euro exchange rate has an impact on the business in terms of the cost of raw materials.”

Gray is also monitoring the effects of the post-credit crunch economic downturn, though he believes Prinovis Liverpool is well-placed to ride out the storm.

He said: “We have an enviable client base. We have some significant long-term contracts already both from a newspaper periodical background but also retail.

“But there’s no doubt it’s a challenging business climate.”

Surrey-born Gray joined Prinovis last year after a career spent at the printing arm of Daily Post parent Trinity Mirror. He joined the then Mirror Group Newspapers in 1988 as a graduate trainee, spending 10 years at its Watford printing plant before becoming general manager at its Oldham plant.

Gray joined Prinovis in September, relishing the challenge of joining such an advanced plant at such an early stage of its development.

Twenty acres of Prinovis’s 50-acre site remain unused, leaving enough space for the company to double the size of the plant.

Gray says such an expansion would be “fantastic”, but says he wants to make a success of what he already has before considering such ambitious plans.

He said: “There are no plans currently in terms of extensions to the plant. The potential to do that is always going to be dependent on market conditions and the profitability.

“At this moment in time, it’s far too early for the plant to consider anything like that. We are just ramping up production to make sure we deliver the return on investment for our shareholders before we go any further.

“But it would have been foolhardy for the business to select a site that was too small for future investment or wouldn’t allow future investments.”

alistairhoughton