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.