Meet the UK's top 20 specialist print resellers

Top 20 print specialists on our radar grew collective revenues 7.2 per cent to £675m last year, CRN Essential's latest mini-report finds

If the print market is in the doldrums, no one told the 20 specialist B2B print providers featured in CRN's inaugural Print Provider Report, who raked in collective revenues of £675m in their latest financial years.

Though print may be facing an existential threat, this score of players grew collective revenues by 7.2 per cent in their most recent annual accounts.

The 20 largest players on our radar, which include Apogee, Altodigital, Annodata and Xeretec, banked collective annual operating profits of £36.7m, representing a healthy 5.8 per cent of revenues.

That's well above the 3.9 per cent average margin posted by the UK's Top 250 resellers.

And yet the print provider market is undergoing a period of upheaval. Hardware sales are declining, and several top players, among them Danwood, Annodata and Midshire, have been snapped up in the last year, the latter two by vendors.

Some onlookers are asking whether the print industry and its channel will even be relevant in the workplace in a decade's time as the shift in workplace habits accelerates.

This is the second of five sector-specific reports CRN is making available exclusively to subscribers of our new CRN Essential service.

The report includes:

• Profiles of the top 20 UK specialist print providers by revenue
• An analysis of their revenue growth, profitability, headcount and wages
• An overview of the major trends impacting print players
• A look at emerging opportunities for print players, including 3D printing, digital transformation and wireless printing
• Interviews with top print players

In an interview for the report, James Kight, managing director of Printerland said: "People said we would stop printing and that everyone would move to a paperless office. But we'll finish on £45m this March and next year we'll do £50m."

Mark Smyth, operations director at Vision Group, meanwhile, argues in the report that it is "inevitable" that the trend of print vendors buying up print resellers will continue.

"The OEMs have to be careful, because the moment they buy another reseller, they run the risk of alienating themselves from their other partners," he warned.

CRN Essential subscribers can view the full report here. For more about CRN Essential and how to subscribe, click here and here. Or for any information, please contact: [email protected]