The deal includes an initial payment of £3m and a deferred payment of £5m, secured against St Ives Direct Bradford’s (SIDB) assets and repayable in 24 monthly installments commencing on 1 November. St Ives Direct Bradford generated a pre-tax profit of £1.2m on sales of £35m for the year to 27 July 2012 and had gross assets of £11.1m, including property, which St Ives will retain ownership of and lease to Cogent B2B at a market rate. Around 180 staff remain at Bradford following the outsourcing of its enclosing operation earlier in the summer, all 180 will now transfer to Cogent B2B. According to its website, Cogent B2B offers consultancy services to distressed SMEs with a turnover of £1m to £60m, although it has recently started acquiring direct mail companies, starting with Bradford-based Prospect Mailing Services, which it purchased in October 2012. This was followed, in November 2012, by the acquisition of Leeds-based Griffin Direct Mailing and today’s announcement of its purchase of St Ives Direct Bradford. St Ives said the disposal was consistent with its strategy to refocus on marketing services and move away from the commoditised sectors of the print market. This began with the sale of its loss-making Dutch multimedia business, St Ives Uden, in 2008. and continued with the sale of its remaining overseas subsidiary, St Ives (USA), in 2009. In the UK, this strategy has resulted in the closure of: St Ives’ Crayford CD and DVD packaging business; its Blackburn, Edenbridge and Leeds direct mail facilities; fine art printer Westerham Press; Sevenoaks Print Finishers; and its Andover web plant, which was closed prior to the sale of magazine printing arm St Ives Web. At the same time St Ives has made numerous marketing services acquisitions, including Occam DM, Tactical Solutions, Response One, Pragma Holdings, Sponge, Amaze, and Branded3 Search, and a minority stake in e-book business Evolved. St Ives chief executive Patrick Martell, who was appointed in April 2009 and has been the driving force behind the reshaping of the business, said: “Following a fundamental realignment of our business, in which we have built a substantial and broadly-based marketing services offering while moving away from commoditised print, it is clear that SIDB no longer fits within our new structure and will benefit from alternative ownership. “This effectively completes the exit from our non-core printing operations, and allows us to focus wholly on strengthening our marketing services offering and remaining print businesses, in line with our stated strategy.” Cogent B2B director Kevin Dunstall was unavailable for comment at the time of writing....

MGI, based in Paris, said the takeover positioned it in a “new high-growth market” that is forecast to be worth $300bn in a few years. Ceradrop in Limoges was launched seven years ago by members of the noted laboratory Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique. It develops kit for printing 2D and 3D-ceramic and organic electronic components with high added-value. These include antennas, organic light emitting diode display screens, electronic chip cards, solar cells, RFID tags, and biomedical sensors. Customers include advanced scientific laboratories and industrial groups such as Gemalto, DisaSolar and Thales, as well as American universities such as Northwestern. An important high-growth market includes printed displays for the industrial and third generation printed solar panels. The team of 15 doctors, engineers and technicians is currently working on printed fuel cells using inkjets and a project involving printed ceramic magnetic components. The printed electronics’ market, worth $9.4bn in 2012, is forecast to grow to more than $40bn in 2020 and $300bn by 2030. MGI vice president for marketing Kevin Abergel said: “We are still under blackout on acquisition costs, but we will help push Ceradrop to the next level: they do inkjets; we do inkjets, but the two are completely different. Printed electronics is in the early stages of commercial viability. “We want to integrate a lot of the cool stuff they are doing into our machines – this is about bringing their technology into the graphic arts and seeing how we can get creative in different ways.” His uncle, MGI president Edmond Abergel, said: “With the explosion of printed electronics and 3D-printing, new opportunities are available. With the Ceradrop team we can establish a centre of excellence with exceptional and global expertise in the field of inkjet. “Integrating Ceradrop will enable us not only to accelerate innovation in our current markets but also to position ourselves in these new markets for printed electronics and 3D-printing, which has been widely forecast to become mass market in the next five years.”...

MGI, based in Paris, said the takeover positioned it in a “new high-growth market” that is forecast to be worth $300bn in a few years. Ceradrop in Limoges was launched seven years ago by members of the noted laboratory Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique. It develops kit for printing 2D and 3D-ceramic and organic electronic components with high added-value. These include antennas, organic light emitting diode display screens, electronic chip cards, solar cells, RFID tags, and biomedical sensors. Customers include advanced scientific laboratories and industrial groups such as Gemalto, DisaSolar and Thales, as well as American universities such as Northwestern. An important high-growth market includes printed displays for the industrial and third generation printed solar panels. The team of 15 doctors, engineers and technicians is currently working on printed fuel cells using inkjets and a project involving printed ceramic magnetic components. The printed electronics’ market, worth $9.4bn in 2012, is forecast to grow to more than $40bn in 2020 and $300bn by 2030. MGI vice president for marketing Kevin Abergel said: “We are still under blackout on acquisition costs, but we will help push Ceradrop to the next level: they do inkjets; we do inkjets, but the two are completely different. Printed electronics is in the early stages of commercial viability. “We want to integrate a lot of the cool stuff they are doing into our machines – this is about bringing their technology into the graphic arts and seeing how we can get creative in different ways.” His uncle, MGI president Edmond Abergel, said: “With the explosion of printed electronics and 3D-printing, new opportunities are available. With the Ceradrop team we can establish a centre of excellence with exceptional and global expertise in the field of inkjet. “Integrating Ceradrop will enable us not only to accelerate innovation in our current markets but also to position ourselves in these new markets for printed electronics and 3D-printing, which has been widely forecast to become mass market in the next five years.”...

Each comprehensive school bringing more than 35 students to the event will be given a 3D printer. The 3D Printshow education session will also run in the Paris and New York shows and is part of a long-term plan to support 3D printing in schools, which will include an education tour in 2014. Show director Kerry Hogarth said the education initiative was budgeted at £120,000 and she expected to give away around 50 printers at London, which were Ultimaker models retailing for £1,700 each and £900 Up Mini printers. “Since the first show last year we have worked with the industry on how we can build 3D printing into the curriculum,” she said. “Software, design and print is going to play an increasing part of people’s lives and it seemed wrong to host such a show without involving young people.” Organisers hope the initiative will prompt more students to take up science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Each participating group will attend a 3D printing workshop and each child will make and take away a 3D print. Seminars will be held in a 3D Printshow Lab. The lab will be a classroom environment equipped with giant Lego-style furniture and constructed in partnership with Ogilvy Labs. Sessions will be hosted by The Denford ‘F1 For Schools’ Team, Autodesk, Legacy Effects, Stratasys, MakerBot, Printcraft, KIDE, EuropePac, and Robosavvy. Students will also be shown Printshow London’s key attractions, including a catwalk show of 3D printed clothing and accessories, a 3D movie zone with props from Iron Man, Avatar and Pacific Rim, and a scanning zone offering full colour and texture 3D body scan prints. The 3D Printshow at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London from 7-9 November, for more details click here...

The firm chose the £23,500 guillotine for its low power consumption, compact size and quality. “Our Schneider 75EM that this replaced served us well- we’d had it in for ten years since we brought it new. We shopped around and considered all makes and models, but we considered Polar to be the best on the market in terms of quality, value and performance,” said owner of JR Press Geoff Fone. He added: “It’s an eco-model so it’s eco-credentials were important to us, as we’re a company striving to become carbon neutral.” The Polar install has come ahead of a planned expansion of JR’s in-house packaging finishing capabilities. The company intends to order a new KAMA die cutting and new KAMA gluing machine ready for installation in the first quarter of 2014. The investments, which will bring JR’s recent spend on finishing kit to the £400,000 mark, will hopefully see JR Press become the first UK printer to install a KAMA automatic die cutting line, reported Fone. “The beauty of that machine is that typically people are running about 2,000-3,000 an hour, but this machine runs at 6,000 an hour and has a optional stripping unit on it, which means you only need one person running it,” said Fone. Of the company’s strategy of moving away from commercial print and into printed packaging, he added: “We’re a B3 printer and have been around for 25 years and have been doing commercial print for 23 of them, but two years ago we moved into a brand new purpose-built factory, invested in new machinery to diversify into printed packaging and away from commercial print. “Since then our turnover has grown by 30% and the amount of packaging we do is now 50% in as short a time as two years.” The Polar 78 ECO has a cutting width of 780mm, a maximum loading height of 120mm and knife speed of 45 cycles per minute. It also features Polar OptiKnife for fast knife changing and positioning accuracy of 1/100mm....