City printer placed in receivership

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/04/2011 (4741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Another Winnipeg printing shop — the second this year — has shut down, putting 125-plus people out of work.

The Printcrafters Group of Companies was placed in receivership earlier this month, owing the Royal Bank of Canada close to $4.5 million, plus about $2 million to Xerox, $1.2 million to CIT Financial and more than $2 million to unsecured creditors, including the Receiver General of Canada.

The company was owned by Bob Payne and formed in 1996. It underwent aggressive expansion through much of the last decade, buying a handful of other Winnipeg print services companies including Dave’s Quick Print, Globally Boundless (formerly GB Graphics), Westcan Printing Group and Kildonan Printing.

Company officials were unavailable to speak on the record Monday, but employees at its Hutchings Street production plant said business has been tailing off over the past couple of years.

“Of course the Internet is one element of the problem, but not every printing operation is closing,” one employee who requested anonymity said. “Other companies have made adjustments.”

In documents that are on the public record, the court-appointed receivers, Ernst & Young, made it clear “the receiver does not anticipate that there will be any funds available for distribution to unsecured creditors.”

A skeleton crew was on site at the Hutchings plant on Monday, but employees said the last of the printer’s jobs will be finished early this week and there will be no new work acquired. The only Printcrafters’ positions left will be those helping the receiver dispose of equipment. Operations at Dave’s Quick Print shut down earlier this month.

At the beginning of the year, Naylor Publications closed its Winnipeg production shop, eliminating 80 positions. That company, founded in Winnipeg 40 years ago, has outsourced its printing business.

One departing Printcrafters employee said, “Some people say the printing industry now is all about a race to the bottom.”

Doug Picklyk, editor of Canadian Printing magazine, said he did not have intimate knowledge of Printcrafters’ business, but that the entire commercial printing sector “has been feeling the pinch” these days.

“One thing about Printcrafters is that its growth over the past few years, through acquisitions, has exceeded the norms in the industry in Canada,” Picklyk said.

In addition to commercial printing, Printcrafters also printed books and colour periodicals. Its clients ranged from Scholastics, the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books with more than 600 new hardcover, paperback, and novelty books each year, to Esposus, a high-end art magazine from New York.

An employee said the firm had many long-standing customers and the only good news is that a surprising number of the sales staff have landed positions with other firms in the province.

Some people familiar with the company said it was bad timing for the company to be as financially leveraged as it was during a post-recession period, where the Canadian dollar was expensive, global competition was intensifying and online tools were competing with traditional print products.

Canadian Printing’s Picklyk said, “Book printers specifically are coming to the realization quite quickly that if they have not yet got involved in on-demand, digital book printing to some degree — because that is what publishers are starting to ask for more these days — then it would be a problem.”

In fact, Canadian Printing, a trade journal owned by Rogers Publishing, stopped publishing a printed version of the periodical last year and now only comes out in a digital edition.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca