Waterford's Cantec Group acquires Offtech in Midlands expansion push

Waterford-based printing services company Cantec Group acquired Kilkenny-printing service Offtech Group in a move that sees Cantec seek a stronger foothold in the Irish midlands.

“We're operating throughout Ireland now, but we were weak in counties Kilkenny, Laois, Offaly, the kind of Midlands counties,” said Cantec Group CEO Éadaoin Carrick while speaking to the News & Star.

“We were weak there because Offtech were strong. They're offering a similar business, but a little bit closer to the customers.”

Cantec was founded in 1994, first as a solely print-focused business in Waterford. Against the backdrop of global recessions and technological revolutions, the business has leaned increasingly heavily into software and IT offerings.

Carrick said Offtech has charted a similar path since its foundation in 1988. Consolidation has become a cornerstone of the group’s expansion strategy.

Cantec employs a fleet of engineers across the country tasked with repairing mechanical issues for clients in a designated area. Where a large-scale operation like Cantec can operate this fleet from a singular call centre with efficiency, it’s less feasible for smaller businesses.

The acquisition of Offtech marks a return to form following the pandemic-era blowbacks, where Cantec and the wider printing industry were left acutely exposed.

A large sum of business was based around the rental of cutting-edge printers that operated on a pay-per-print basis.

When offices around the globe cleared out, and printers were left sitting vacant in dark, dormant offices, the effects were devastating. Cantec's subsidiary office in Mullingar was forced to close.

“We got hit really, really hard… the government supports that were available at the time were very helpful. It's really when the supports ended and we hadn't quite recovered that it was very difficult.” 

Cantec was at its biggest when Covid hit, and as Carrick recalls, “it took kind of three, four years to get back to beyond that again.” 

“It was a very stressful time for everyone, because, you know, at the start, nobody knew what was happening or what was going to happen, and then it just seemed to go on forever…We're all happy to put it behind us.”

Over their three decades in business, the business had become used to pivoting in response to external pressures.

“My parents founded the business in 1994 and at that time, the business was a photocopier dealership, so people would have a dumb machine sitting in the corner,” says Carrick.

“It was just plugged into electricity, nothing else, and you brought your pieces of paper over to it and took photocopies so that everybody could have a page. In 1994, people didn't even have PCs on their desks.” 

Things couldn’t be more different. At the start of this decade, Cantec merged with Cork-based SmartOffice Technologies, a company offering an accounts payable automation system.

There are now two distinct wings of the business: Cantec, which provides the bread and butter hardware (albeit expensive and cutting-edge) and SmartOffice, their software side.

While Carrick says dystopian (or utopian, depending on readers' environmental inclinations) visions of “a paperless office” will never fully come through, the entire framing of printers had to change.

“(Businesses) will do less and less all the time, and so what we offer along with our devices, Managed Print software that comes with the devices themselves, is all about security, GDPR.

Carrick says that 40% of the business's customer base is public bodies - whether it’s UCC, UL or contracts with county councils, where invariably, security concerns are high.

“It facilitates anti-hacking, cybersecurity in a way, as well as your old-fashioned ‘losing pieces of paper on the street’ kind of security. You can't send a document to your printer when you've got this software running; it will not come out of the exit tray unless you go over and you swipe your card.

“There's traceability there all the time…We will continue the hardware, because it's fundamentally who we are, but there will be more and more software at the time.”

Revenues are projected to fall just shy of €10 million, and the workforce has now expanded to over 50 employees.

Looking ahead, predicting the future - the next boom and busts, the next workflow revelations - remains as impossible as ever, but Cantec look to have found themselves on even footing in an oft-erratic industry.