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Joanne Gardner tracks down the solutions to your print problems

Q We are a team of engineering students at the University of Southampton with connections to its Entrepreneurs’ Society. For our degree, we are proposing to set up as an environmentally conscious print service provider, initially acting as a broker. We want to utilise original markets and market pressures to generate a customer base and grow a supplier pool. Do you know where we might be able to source any useful figures like operating costs, required start-up capital, number of employers to staff, sales take-up/market percentage etc? We’re also interested in commonly successful products, their pricings, market trends/cycles. Do you have any valid examples or real financial statements upon which we could base our projects? We’ve only a month to complete the project, so most original research is unachievable.
Tom York
Via email

A Here at PrintWeek we publish the PrintWeek Top 500, which is a round-up of the financial performance of the top 500 print companies in the country. It includes figures on turnover, operating and pre-tax profits, return on capital employed, staff numbers and so on. As you’re students, we’d be happy to let you have a copy. If you want to set up a print broking business, you could do worse than to read the annual reports of listed print management companies TripleArc and Communisis – they do a huge amount more than print broking, but they may give you an idea of the kind of issues at stake. For other information, it could be worth speaking to the British Printing Industries Federation (www.britishprint.com ), research organisation Pira (www.pira.co.uk) and Infotrends (www.capv.com ).

Q I’m looking for a Chinese manufacturer of ultra-violet fluorescent ink for use in security printing. Do you know of any?
Name and address supplied

A I’ve managed to find Guangzhou Mingbo Anti-forgery Technology (00 86 20865 91919 – ask to speak to Pioneer Lu), but it doesn’t seem to have a website. Anyway, according to various business directories, it is a reputable firm specialising in anti-forgery printing ink, including ultra-violet fluorescent ink. The product comes in shortwave and longwave versions as either achromatic, chromatic or discoloration. For those who don’t know, achromatic inks glow red, yellow, green and blue; chromatic inks brighten the original colour, and discoloration inks can change from one colour to another.

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