The recent announcement that R.R. Donnelley is to pay £520 million (US$ 990 million) to acquire the UK organization Astron will raise many questions. The first may be who is Astron? The second may well be what do they do?

For me I find this acquisition very interesting. I have known Astron almost from the time of their start up in 1996. I first met Astron through their CEO David Mitchell. I was asked, I think in 1997, to propose the motion in the annual debate held at the House of Parliament by the UK professional institution, The Institute of Printing. I needed someone to second the motion. I asked David Mitchell to do this and he accepted. Luckily the motion the two of us put forward won the day, and I met one of the UK’s most interesting and successful print entrepreneurs. Today if given the chance I would be honored to second any motion proposed by David Mitchell.

Astron is what is known in the UK printing industry as a print management company. It employs 4,000 staff in 70 locations in the UK, Europe and Asia, and will have revenues in 2005 in excess of $500 million. Print management is an area of printing where the UK leads the rest of the world in changing the way print is acquired and managed. Astron actually calls itself a document BPO organization. BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. BPO is the process where corporate organizations offload non-core areas of their businesses, which can be handled in a better way by other specialist organizations - Printing is a good example of this. Astron is not a printer, but a company that works with other printers and acts as the interface between them and the ultimate print purchaser. In years gone by this used to be called print brokering, but print management is more than this. In fact Astron is far more than just a print management company. It provides a total document management and service organization. In fact, I tend to regard Astron as more of a document support and logistics company than a print management company.