Prinovis management informed the 545-strong workforce at Prinovis Ahrensburg, near Hamburg, last Thursday that it would cease operations at the site by 31 January 2024. Ulrich Cordes, managing director of Prinovis and CFO of Bertelsmann Printing Group, described the decision to close the loss-making site as a difficult but unavoidable due to market conditions. The company blamed the structural decline in the European gravure printing market over the past decade driven by falling demand for high-volume magazines and catalogues.

CJK Group, Inc. announced that it has completed an agreement to acquire the assets of Times Printing, LLC in Random Lake, Wisconsin. Previously owned and operated as part of Nicholas Karabots’ Kappa Media Group of affiliated companies, the 324,000 sq. ft. print facility specializes in high quality 4-color printing of magazines, catalogs, and a wide spectrum of commercial print products. Times Printing capably serves the retail, consumer, and special interest markets, including B2B, travel and leisure, comics, and fundraising industries. The facility handles a variety of finish sizes, including digest, tabloid, slim jim, and oblong. Web and sheetfed presses accommodate long runs, short runs, and short cut-off work, heat set processes, and complex versioning and fulfillment. The facility offers full mailing and logistics services including co-mail, co-mingle, bound printed matter, and drop ship mailing. This acquisition will bring additional services and capabilities to the Sheridan companies, while giving Sheridan access to new markets. Organizationally, the plant will be recognized under the Sheridan brand, to be known as Sheridan Random Lake.

It’s been hard to avoid the conversation around postal rates in the commercial and direct mail printing industry during the past few years. As Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has made aggressive moves to bring the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) into profitability after the requirement to pre-pay the organization’s pension fund was finally relaxed, printers have borne the brunt of those rising prices. Print buyers have started pushing back when it comes to higher mailing costs, especially as the costs of everything from the inks, to the paper, to the labor running the presses have also been on the rise. But what does the actual landscape look like for print providers on the postal rate front? And how are they managing the increases? Unfortunately, the bulk of those increases seems to have come rapidly during the past couple of years, leaving commercial/direct mail printers and print buyers alike scrambling to compensate for costs that are significantly higher. A few cents per piece spread out across thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of pieces adds up fast, after all, and can take a huge chunk out of the direct marketing budget before anyone can blink. And that impact is being felt as buyers pull back on the number of pieces they’re mailing to compensate for those higher costs.