Sydney printer Graphics Plus will close for good after administrators failed to find a buyer for the stricken business despite 32 expressions of interest.

The specialist UV printer famous for its plastics work went into administration on March 30 with debts of more than $1.5m, and will now be liquidated.

Former employees say the company had been struggling for the past year with falling sales and $200,000 in bad debts from fallen clients including Geon and Focus Press.

Administrator Thomas Dawson at Insol Group says despite 32 expressions of interest in buying Graphics Plus as a going concern, the most for any company in his 15-year career, he could not get a deal done.

“I think they thought the asking price was too high and they could pick up the clients anyway,” he says.

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Dawson says all 16 staff have been made redundant and the equipment, including an Agfa Anapurna M1600 and a manroland UV offset press, will be auctioned off by Grays Online in the second week of May.

The staff, owed about $300,000 in entitlements, will get their superannuation from the asset sale and the rest from a Fair Entitlement Guarantee claim.

Dawson says trade creditors are owed about $300,000 and under new laws four suppliers including at least one big paper merchant will get priority.

Owner Phillip Delaney, who ran the business for 26 years, is the biggest creditor, having sunk $800,000-$1m into the business.

Graphics Plus lost $61,500 from the Focus Press collapse and former employees say it is out of pocket about $40,000 from Geon and $110,000 from a design agency that went bust last year.

Margins and sales were falling across the market and it was facing increased competition, including from its own polypropylene sheet material supplier Megara, which recently began supplying finished products.

They say the last straw was the lease on its Silverwater plant ending and the landlord wanting a five-year renewal. With Delaney nearing retirement he did not want to commit to a long-term deal with the business in the shape it was in.

The company pioneered offset printing onto plastic more than 30 years ago and had trade services including UV printing and printing on plastics, as well as packaging, point-of-sale, commercial print, retail graphics, digital printing, digital finishing, design and prototyping.

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