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Endpoint: Sun Printers Ltd.



created on: 25/02/2021
by: Lo55o (12478)
 
 

Company properties

General info :
Sun Printers Ltd. was a British printing company founded in 1945 as a split off Sun Engraving Co. Ltd.
In 1945 Sun Engraving’s massive printing operations were split off from the engraving operations and sold to the family firm of Hazell, Watson & Viney of Aylesbury, which then formed the Hazell-Sun Group as a holding company for its various production facilities. The Whippendell Road facility was renamed Sun Printers Ltd. and entered into a period of ambitious expansion.
Between 1945 and 1965, Sun Printers Ltd. continued Sun Engraving’s tradition of innovation, pioneering the application of electronics to rotary gravure printing (including colour scanning to produce separations, and electronic register control on the press), and researching and developing new kinds of inks. In 1962, the firm obtained the contract to produce the first-ever weekly colour magazine for a British newspaper. The Sunday Times Colour Magazine proved a huge success. Employment at Sun Printers peaked in 1963 with more than 3,600 people on the payroll.

That same year, Hazell-Sun Group merged with Purnell Group to create a formidable new printing conglomerate they called the British Printing Corporation (BPC). For many reasons, Sun Printers failed to flourish within the new configuration. The next fifteen years saw a high turn-over of senior management. There was also constant conflict between management and the unions, during a period when unions were becoming increasingly powerful in the U.K. It was also a period of rapid change within the printing industry. Letterpress was foundering, and gravure was losing ground to the new web-offset printing technology that, for self-serving reasons, a majority of BPC’s directors had rejected for Sun Printers. By 1975, sales were falling, and over 92% of company income was being eaten up by wages and salaries. The Sun’s letterpress department was forced to close in 1979 for lack of work. More and more gravure business was moving to the less-expensive web-offset printers, both in the U.K. and on the Continent. The much-delayed introduction of phototypesetting at the Sun in 1980 spelled the end of the large composition department. The ink factory was closed in 1981. By this time, the company was in grave financial difficulties.

Robert Maxwell bought a controlling interest in BPC in 1981 and changed its name to the British Printing and Communications Corporation (BPCC). He soon acquired Odhams, Watford’s other large gravure printing house, which was also struggling to survive, and, in 1983, merged it with the Sun at the Whippendell Road site to create Odhams-Sun Printers Ltd. He funded an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful. research-and-development project to engrave gravure cylinders by means of laser beams (it was an idea ahead of its time), brought web offset to ‘the Sun’ (as everyone still called the company), and oversaw the paring down of departments and workforce in an attempt to return the company to a position that would be competitive with other U.K. and European printers. But the Sun continued to lose contracts and failed to win bids for new work. In 1984, Maxwell bought Mirror Group Newspapers and quietly refurbished the vacant Odhams facility as a printing plant for the Daily Mirror. In 1987, the year that BPCC became a subsidiary of Maxwell Communications Corporation (MCC), he began to poach the Sun’s web-offset operators to train on and run his new newspaper presses. Many Sun employees went to work for the Mirror, while others, who wished to stay with gravure, transferred to Purnell’s in Bristol.

Maxwell’s deputy and several other directors bought the BPCC Group from MCC in 1989. Most of the Whippendell Road site was abandoned after the deal went through, and a much-reduced printing operation was moved into the Sun’s refurbished former paper warehouse on Ascot Road. Web offset was the only printing method used on the new site, and employees of the once-mighty Sun now numbered around 200. The presses were kept busy, but the Sun (now called BPCC Sun Ltd.) seem to have lost its way and sense of self. Soon, it even lost its name, becoming BPCC Consumer Magazines (Watford) Ltd.

In 1996, BPCC (by then the British Printing Company Ltd.) merged with Watmoughs (Holdings) plc to form a new printing conglomerate called Polestar Group, of which the Sun became just a small satellite. Polestar removed the last printing presses from the Ascot Road site in 2004 and closed the site down.
Source :
ENA's Sun Printers Ltd. London And Watford | Sun Printers Ltd. Watford And London | Sun Printers Ltd. Watford, London And Manchester

Magazines

(3 items)

Item number : 38307

Submitted by : Lo55o (12478)
on : 25/02/2021