Blue Star says its acquisition of STI Lilyfield is already bearing fruit as it slims down the operation and aims for a 33 per cent sales boost by year’s end.

Newly-promoted Blue Star chief operating officer Matt Aitken says the retail display division is pulling in new business worth millions a year from point-of-sale work for existing Blue Star clients.

He says with housekeeping and training completed, the business has had a good couple of months and expects to grow point-of-sale revenue by a third this year.

[Related: More Blue Star news]

Aitken says Blue Star’s existing point-of-sale operations have been merged into the Padstow facility and three offset large format presses have been replaced with new digital kit.

The site is now purely point-of-sale with STI’s commercial printing business offloaded, though Blue Star has retained the majority of STI’s $20m turnover.

He says the 35-40 staff who did not work on point-of-sale were made redundant by STI headquarters in Germany a few weeks before the sale was completed.

“We took a pragmatic view of what to keep and decided we did not need the extra commercial printing extra capacity. It was quite under-utilised in the STI business and they were not really using it.” Aitken says.

“That revenue has now gone back into the market and we sold the equipment to overseas buyers so there is less overcapacity in the industry. We have streamlined the business to make it more profitable.”

[Related: More merger and acquisition news]

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