“We were primarily offset but there’s a big move towards digital and that was not a strength of the business,” says David Kugel, managing director of Komori house Network Printing Studios at Alexandria in Sydney’s inner west, which has gone into liquidation after 17 years.
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| Network Printing Studios, 86 Wyndham St, Alexandria NSW 2015 |
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| David Kugel, Network Printing |
“We had 16 years of consecutive growth but in this game the overheads are fairly massive and you can have a few bad months and you’re out of business,” Kugel told Wide Format Online. “It’s very hard to come back from that and that’s the bottom line.”
Kugel says Network Printing, which employed 13 staff and ran a Komori S29P 8 ColourPress, was not well-equipped to cope with smaller jobs and the shift to digital work.
"We didn’t lose any clients, which included some very large organisations, but the quantities of the jobs weren’t as big as they had been.
“It was primarily an offset business and we had a very basic digital operation. But a lot of jobs that were previously 5,000 runs were now 500 runs, which meant they were going to digital. You have a responsibility to your client to produce jobs as economically as you can and if the jobs are small you can’t really produce them using offset so you have to go digital. We just weren’t geared up that way. You’ve got to have the right equipment.
“All I can say is the industry continues to change and my advice to everybody else is to be able to offer a full suite of services in-house. You go to these trade shows and you do see a lot of equipment there but the companies that can afford to buy the equipment are the bigger companies. The strong get stronger. Not everyone can afford to invest $150,000 in the latest digital printer that needs to be paid off in five years."
Kugel has helped some of his staff to secure new jobs. “At the end we had 13 staff and those that wanted them all have jobs, people I considered to be as good as you can find in the industry. Sometimes finding a job is more to do with who you know so I got on the phone for those that wanted to stay in the industry.”
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| Network Printing Studios |
Kugel himself is not going back into printing. “It’s been fairly traumatic and upsetting and there are people that have been burned by my business going down. I’m really sorry for any hurt or financial pain that Network’s closure has caused. I’ve seen a number of companies that have phoenixed but that’s immoral and it’s wrong so I’m going to lick my wounds and have a think about what I want to do next. I’m not in a financial position to contemplate early retirement. I’ll find something to do, I’m not sure what and I’m not sure when, but I want to take a little bit of a break and just get my head back into gear.”
A creditors’ meeting is expected to be announced shortly.
