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

May 7 2008 by Alistair Houghton, Liverpool Daily Post

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@dailypost.co.uk