Standard Register is a leader in the healthcare, financial services, commercial business and industrial markets. They are also big in the industry of print services, promotional products, and technology; so when the announcement came that the Dayton, Ohio company, Standard Register, was likely on its way out of business, you can imagine the surprised reaction.
Yesterday, the Dayton Daily News reported that, “The Standard Register Co. has received written notice that trading of the Dayton-based company’s common stock on the New York Stock Exchange would be suspended before the NYSE opened Wednesday.” In return, Standard Register has informed the NYSE that it “will not appeal the determination, because of the cost of the appeal and the likelihood of success.”
Does this mean that Standard Register is really going out of business? That remains to be seen, but their prospects don’t appear to be good. At 11:06AM EST shares of Standard Register were trading in the range of just $0.35…it closed at $0.91 yesterday on the last day of NYSE trading.
So, to answer the obvious follow up question: why is Standard Register going out of business?
My take on why this may be happening – after spending my entire life around the print industry – is that the business model has changed. For a company like Standard Register it’s hard to change. They have traditionally owned the iron or owned their own presses. That is a lot of overhead. Over the years they have started to outsource, but when you still have that overhead you’re going to try and fill it first…and a lot of times that doesn’t make sense. Then, when they acquired Workflow One, an acquisition that many thought would be the other way around, it seemed that they were never able to recover from the debt of that acquisition.
That’s just my two cents, but it’s hard to say when I’m not in the middle of the battle. Either way, our positive thoughts are with everyone in the Standard Register family and their shareholders as well.
The unfortunate part is this is another piece of news that continues to blacken the eye of our industry. I feel it’s as vibrant as ever. Is it different? Yes. Have we had our challenges? Yes. But when you look at the size of what I consider our industry it’s an “over 100 billion industry.” That is pretty big in my book. Some part of Standard Register will likely survive, but exactly how no one knows yet. Time will tell.
