PhillyInc: Quality Park closure: What goes around...

In writing about the growth of

Triumph Group Inc.

for Sunday's Inquirer, I was reminded how small a world the local business community can be.

Three years after gaining its independence from Alco Standard Corp. in a management-led buyout in 1993, aerospace company Triumph sold off a paper-converting business, Quality Park Products Inc., that had been included in the buyout from Alco Standard.

Triumph sold Quality Park to Mail-Well Inc. for $27.35 million in March 1996. You can understand why: Paper converting and aircraft parts would seem to share little.

But Quality Park, based at the time in St. Paul, Minn., was contributing about $100 million, or about one-third, of the revenue of the then-fledgling company. So it was not an insignificant amount of business to give up.

The name Quality Park rang a bell because of a plant-closing notice filed with Pennsylvania officials this month. On Dec. 3, Cenveo Inc. advised the Department of Labor and Industry that it would close the Exton operation of Quality Park as of Feb. 2. State officials said the move would cost 73 people their jobs.

Like Triumph, the Stamford, Conn.-based Cenveo, which changed its name from Mail-Well in 2004, has grown by acquisition. The printer employs 7,300 people in about 70 locations in the United States and reported $1.9 billion net sales in 2011. At the start of 2012, Cenveo had 31 manufacturing locations in its envelopes and labels business segment, which was expanded greatly with the 2011 purchase of MeadWestvaco Corp.'s envelope business.

This year, Cenveo launched a cost-cutting program to consolidate the offices and warehouses of its printing and envelope businesses, including the elimination of about 700 employees by the end of 2012, according to a November filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As 2012 nears its close, Cenveo's Exton operations would seem to be a victim of that cost-cutting drive.