中文There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a factory in its final months. The machines still run, the ink still smells, but everyone on the floor knows the clock is ticking. By December 31, that silence becomes permanent at Euro-Druckservice’s web offset plant outside Bucharest.
The German-headquartered printing group — known in the trade as EDS — has confirmed it will close the Romanian site this year. The stated reasons are painfully familiar to anyone who has watched the European print sector over the past decade: declining demand and rising production costs. But behind that corporate shorthand sits a story about an entire way of making printed matter that is quietly disappearing.
At its peak, this was no small operation. The Bucharest facility printed roughly 47,000 tonnes of paper every single year. It employed 210 people and turned over around €48 million (£41.1 million) annually. It ran a serious fleet of Manroland presses — a Rotoman N, a Lithoman III, and no fewer than four Lithoman IV machines — churning out the catalogues, flyers and brochures that fill the racks of European retailers. The plant was built in 2008, and when EDS Romania acquired the local printer Mega Press Holdings in 2023, capacity doubled almost overnight.
So how does a plant like that end up with a closing date stamped on the wall?
According to EDS chief operating officer Robert Vukelić, volumes “declined steadily and significantly” over recent years. The site’s bread and butter was flyers for the retail sector, and that market, the company says, “experienced declining demand for several years.” That alone would be enough to hurt. But it was compounded by what EDS calls a “disproportionate” rise in Romanian production costs — energy, labour, and the price of sourcing paper compared with other European locations all climbing faster than the business could absorb.
Put those two forces together and you get the squeeze that is killing web offset across the continent. When the work dries up and the cost of doing it rises at the same time, no amount of efficiency saves you.
The human cost is still being calculated. Vukelić says the number of people affected has not been confirmed, because “we intend to transfer part of the employees to our other locations.” Some will move to EDS’s other plants; the rest will be let go. Employees were told the plan on 19 August. The site winds down at the end of the year.
EDS chief executive Tomas Kramar framed the decision in the language executives reach for in moments like this: “This step reflects changing customer requirements and enables us to optimise capacities across our European production network, while continuing to provide reliable and high-quality service to our customers.” It is a polished sentence. It does not make the redundancies any easier to absorb.
What is worth noticing is that EDS as a whole is not in trouble. The group runs seven sites across five countries — Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Romania — employs 1,330 people and generates sales of around €223 million. This is a targeted retreat, not a collapse. EDS is consolidating where the maths still works and walking away where it does not.
And that is exactly why this closure should ring alarm bells beyond Bucharest. The continental web offset market is consolidating under the twin pressures of declining demand and oversupply. Just last month, Bertelsmann announced plans to close Vogel Druck. Walstead is in the process of shutting its Gotha Druck operation. The pattern is clear: the big web plants that once fed Europe’s retail shelves are being rationalised one by one.
For printers still running web offset, the lesson is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The retail flyer — that weekly slap of glossy paper through the letterbox — is losing the fight for attention and budget. Energy and paper costs are not coming back to where they were. The plants that survive will be the ones that found a reason to exist other than volume catalogue work.
EDS Romania had a good run. Forty-seven thousand tonnes a year is no small thing. But the industry it served is shrinking, and no press, however fine, prints its way out of that.
Source: Printweek — “EDS to close Romania printing plant” (21 August 2026)
