Rotherham web and sheetfed printer Vanacomm ceased trading in April 2026. At the time, its shareholders told PrintWeek the closure was orderly: “The company is not entering into any form of liquidation… we will continue to collect out the book debts with the intention of paying out all creditors.”
By the end of July, Vanacomm was in Creditors’ Voluntary Liquidation. Its newly filed Statement of Affairs shows a total estimated deficiency of just over £5.8m — including more than £1m owed to its own 66 employees, £1.2m to HMRC, and over £538,000 owed to ink, paper and consumables suppliers. Tangible assets on the books at £2.45m were valued at “nil.”
Why this matters if you buy print
The gap between what a struggling printer says publicly and what a Statement of Affairs later reveals can be enormous. Vanacomm’s shareholders described an orderly wind-down; the eventual paperwork told a very different story. If you were a customer being reassured everything was under control in those final weeks, you had no real way to independently check that.
That’s the uncomfortable truth about single-supplier print relationships: you’re relying on a company’s own account of its finances, right up until it’s too late for that to help you.
Spread the risk instead of trying to spot the warning signs
You can’t audit every printer’s balance sheet before every job. What you can do is not depend on any single one. With print management, your brochure, catalogue or magazine work is placed across a vetted network of UK printers — so one supplier’s undisclosed financial trouble is never a single point of failure for your campaign.
Want print buying that doesn’t rest on taking one company’s word for it? Get in touch and we’ll talk through how print management removes that exposure.
Source: Vanacomm leaves huge shortfall, PrintWeek, Jo Francis, 10 August 2026.