The 35-staff Luton-based company, which used to be called White Knight 360, traded back a 13-year-old Xeikon DCP/50D digital colour press to upgrade to one of the latest models, which cost around £300,000. “Things have come a long way in that time,” said managing director Lawrence Palmer. “The weights of stock that we can work with, the colour control we have on the new system, and the vastly superior resolution make this impressive equipment.” With a focus on point-of-sale production, the ability to produce work up to B2 in size – and virtually any length of print – “set the Xeikon digital print engine apart from the vast majority of machines on the market”, he said. “We reviewed the market again but could find nothing to compete on the price-performance package. When you are producing POS product for the retail industry, especially fashion, you have the most colour-conscious customers in the world. They demand only the best.” Xeikon 6000 is targeted at producers of graphic arts, direct marketing and sophisticated web-to-print applications. The press handles substrates up to 350gsm and offers 1,200dpi and is compatible with a wide range of print media and formats. The kit runs at up to 160ppm. Work for WK360 includes POS material for large retail chains, fashion and home furnishing specialists, with runs pushing into several hundreds. Palmer said the kit’s capabilities and FA toner really helped meet expectations of such a “colour-critical market”. Print services director Amanda Gatward said: “We scoured the market and decided there was nothing that could compete on versatility and size. We do lots of large-format point-of-sale material, and A2 posters for pubs takes up quite a large slice of our work.” Xeikon business development manager for document printing Danny Mertens said: “It’s good to be able to please a market so colour critical as the fashion market. This is the very best of evidence for any other prospective purchaser of digital printing equipment.”...

In order to attain the certification, IP had to show the origin of all the fibres used in the paper and demonstrate that 10% of the fibres were sourced from certified sustainable managed forests. IP UK and Ireland country manager Mike Robertson said: “Having the Ecolabel flower logo on the HP Everyday Papers range allows us to demonstrate how seriously International Paper takes our commitment to the environment.” The HP Everyday Papers range is manufactured from virgin fibres and includes grades for all kinds of office applications. It is available from leading UK distributors. HP Everyday Papers are designed to complement HP office printing kit and are optimised for HP’s inks and toners. The Everyday Papers range has also been certified by the PEFC and FSC schemes....

In order to attain the certification, IP had to show the origin of all the fibres used in the paper and demonstrate that 10% of the fibres were sourced from certified sustainable managed forests. IP UK and Ireland country manager Mike Robertson said: “Having the Ecolabel flower logo on the HP Everyday Papers range allows us to demonstrate how seriously International Paper takes our commitment to the environment.” The HP Everyday Papers range is manufactured from virgin fibres and includes grades for all kinds of office applications. It is available from leading UK distributors. HP Everyday Papers are designed to complement HP office printing kit and are optimised for HP’s inks and toners. The Everyday Papers range has also been certified by the PEFC and FSC schemes....

Workers at the business have now received a letter from Chard stating what the situation is at the stricken group, which has been in limbo since last week. The letter, seen by PrintWeek, is titled “Attendance on MPG Printgroup sites” and says: “It is with regret, that I write to confirm MPG Printgroup cannot pay employees wages beyond the 31st May 2013 and effectively are in breach of contract after that date. “You are not required to attend your place of work as from 1500 hours on Friday 31st May 2013. An administrator will be appointed by the banks next week, at this time, the administrator will contact staff moving forward concerning the process of administration.” Workers at the group’s Bodmin and King’s Lynn facilities had already been sent home, whereas employees at Cambridge have been paid up until the end of the month so are still on site. MPG’s two main banks for working capital and asset finance are Lloyds TSB and HSBC. Last week representatives from Zolfo Cooper were on-site at the group, but a source close to the situation said that it now appeared likely that a different company would be used for the group’s administration. Overrunning costs during the setup of its new Cambridge facility, created to take over the former Cambridge University Press (CUP) print operation, appear to have precipitated the group’s collapse. Some employees at Cambridge are blaming the University for their current predicament. One worker told PrintWeek: “It’s not a year since CUP stated that the agreement with MPG would take us former employees into retirement. Well it’s a very early one.” Book and journal printer MPG posted sales of £19.4m in 2011, when it employed 238 staff....

However, the figures published in the latest SME Finance Monitor, a quarterly publication carried out by BDRC Continental since July 2011, indicate that awareness of the government scheme is actually on the rise, albeit slowly. In Q4 of 2012, just 24% of SMEs said they had heard of the scheme, which was launched by the Bank of England and the Treasury last year, offering cheap credit to banks on the condition that they improve their lending levels to businesses and home-owners. The monitor also shows that the number of SMEs using external finance dipped to 39% in Q1 of 2013, down from 50% in the same period last year, and its lowest level since the monitor began. The monitor is carried out on behalf of the Business Finance Round Table, made up of around 20 business, manufacturing and financial organisations. Each quarterly survey involves interviewing a cross-section of 5,000 businesses across various sectors and regions. Another key issue to be highlighted by the latest raft of interviews, which were carried out between January and March this year, was a contraction in the amount of SMEs using credit cards, loans and overdrafts. The use of these core banking products shrank to 32% from 40% year-on-year. Meanwhile, of those that had been declined a loan or overdraft only 9% and 15% respectively said they were made aware of the appeals process. Of the 19% interviewed that said they would like to apply for finance but were unlikely to, 63% cited the economic climate, up from 50% in Q4 of 2012, while 23% said it was the performance of their own business that was an issue. Phil Orford, chief executive of the Forum of Private Business, said the decline in lending was no surprise. “But if this trend continues into Q2 and Q3, eyebrows may be raised with all the talk recently of recovery, not to mention the government’s ‘supercharging’ of the Funding for Lending scheme,” he added. “It seems likely that the banks are still licking their wounds, and that may be the case for some time to come yet, but this pattern of decline can’t continue if we are to have meaningful growth.” Orford said that it was highly likely that any recovery this summer would come largely from firms spending their own stockpiled cash, but he warned that this was not sustainable in the long term. Other figures show that 70% of all applications for new or renewed overdraft or loan facilities were successful, with overdraft applications more likely to be successful than those for loans. However smaller (up to nine employees) and younger SMEs or those with a poor credit rating, were less likely to successfully secure a...