中文In Sneek, a quiet town in the north of the Netherlands, the presses have stopped for good. Not paused between shifts. Not idled for maintenance. Stopped. After 152 years, the folding-carton plant of Royal De Vries has shut down, and 98 people have lost their jobs. The machines are now listed for sale on a German dealer’s website, photographed under fluorescent light like furniture at an estate auction.
Read that number again. A hundred and fifty-two years. De Vries began as a printing house in 1874, back when cartons were cut by hand and the northern Netherlands ran on farming and shipping. It survived two world wars, the collapse of letterpress, the arrival of offset and the rise of digital. In 2016 it earned the Dutch royal designation, an honour reserved for companies that have proven they are part of the national fabric. Ten years later it is gone.
Here is the part that should keep every plant owner awake. This was not a company that refused to invest. In 2021 De Vries installed a seven-colour Koenig & Bauer Rapida 106 with a double coater — serious kit, the sort of press a folding-carton house buys when it intends to be around for another twenty years. In 2024 it spent again, this time on end-of-line automation. By any equipment list, you would call it a modern plant.
And it still died. Turnover slid from EUR 28.3 million in 2023 to EUR 24.3 million in 2025. The books closed with a EUR 3.1 million loss. On 15 June 2026 the company filed for bankruptcy, and a court in Leeuwarden declared it bankrupt the following day. Fast. Brutally fast, for a business with a century and a half of history behind it.
De Vries was not alone in feeling the squeeze. European folding-carton converters have spent three years absorbing higher board prices, energy bills that refuse to return to normal, and brand owners who negotiate harder every quarter. Overcapacity in some segments has turned pricing into a knife fight. In that climate, a plant with a wobble in its service record does not get a grace period. It gets replaced.
So what actually killed it? According to majority shareholder FB Oranjewoud Participaties, which took control in 2018, the fatal wound was self-inflicted. A reorganisation in 2025 — the kind of restructuring that looks tidy on a spreadsheet — triggered quality problems and late deliveries. Customers did what customers do. They moved their work somewhere else.
The engineers fixed the problems. That is the detail that stings. The plant sorted out its quality and its delivery dates, and the orders did not come back. Because in packaging, trust is not a tap you can turn back on. A brand manager who has been burned once, who has had a promotion run land late or a carton arrive off-colour, has already been through the pain of qualifying a new supplier. Why would they go through it twice?
This is the uncomfortable truth the industry keeps relearning. Print buyers are not loyal to presses. They are loyal to certainty. You can have the newest Rapida on the floor and the slickest automation in the bindery, and none of it matters if you miss three delivery dates in a row. Capital equipment buys you capability. It does not buy you forgiveness.
Administrator Christian Geffroy of Dommerholt Advocaten fought hard for a better ending. He kept the plant running until 31 July, finishing open orders — partly to serve customers, partly to keep the operation warm and whole for a buyer. A cold plant is scrap. A running plant is a business. He talked to several interested parties.
None of them signed. “Intensive efforts were made to arrange a going concern, and it is regrettable that this could not be achieved,” Geffroy said. Once continuation was off the table, his duty shifted to the creditors, which meant selling the assets quickly. German plant remarketing specialist Allaoui made a competitive offer for everything at short notice, and took the lot.
Now the machines are on the market. Allaoui’s listings include the 2021 KBA Rapida 106, a Bobst Expertfold 110 A2, a Bobst Visioncut 106 LER, plus die-cutters, folder-gluers and packaging automation equipment. For someone, somewhere, this is the bargain of the year: a nearly new seven-colour press with a double coater, at a price nobody pays for new.
That is the quiet cruelty of the used-equipment market. One company’s fifty-year story ends, and the hardware simply relocates. Within a year that Rapida will be running somewhere else in Europe, printing cartons for brands that never heard of Sneek. The steel outlives the culture that built it.
For the 98 people who lost their jobs, none of this is an interesting case study. It is a mortgage, a school run, and a skill set built over decades in a town that does not have another folding-carton plant down the road. Regional plants like this one are not just employers. They are the reason a trade survives in a place at all. When they close, the knowledge scatters and rarely comes back.
There is a symbolism here that is hard to ignore. A royal designation is meant to signal permanence. It says: this firm is woven into the country. Yet permanence in manufacturing is never granted by history or honours. It is re-earned every single week, on every single job, by people who make sure the pallet leaves the dock when it said it would.
If there is a lesson worth carrying out of Sneek, it is this: guard your delivery record like it is the balance sheet, because it is. Restructure if you must, but never let a reorganisation touch the two things a customer actually measures — did it arrive on time, and was it right. Fix those and you might survive a bad year. Break them and no press on earth will save you.
One hundred and fifty-two years, undone in roughly eighteen months. That is how thin the margin is.
Source: WhatTheyThink — “Dutch Packaging Printer Royal De Vries Closes After 152 Years”, 24 August 2026. Original article: https://whattheythink.com/news/131438-dutch-packaging-printer-royal-de-vries-closes-after-152-years/
