Merchants suffer £8.53m bad debts

Bad debts experienced by paper merchants totalled £8.53 million in the first half of 2010, new figures have shown.

According to the Quarterly Trend Statistics reports published by the National Association of Paper Merchants (NAPM), bad debt levels were, however, lower compared with the corresponding period in 2009.

Merchants suffered £17.5 million in bad debts from failed print companies last year, registering the industry's highest level.

NAPM director Tim Bowler said they expected the number of printing company failures to drop in the first half of this year.

He said: "Clearly, this has not been the case, with the bad debt total for the first half of 2010 easily exceeding the second half of 2009 by some 30%."

Bad debts totalled nearly £6.6 million in the second half of 2009.

Mr Bowler said the industry has been facing a slowdown due to overcapacity and increase in paper prices.

He said: "With a third price increase on the way, it would not be surprising if more printers run out of cash in 2010.

"However, the incident level of bad debts from company failures in July and August does appear to have shown a quite a slowdown."

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