CAMERONS BUYS OPAL ENVELOPES

Opal has sold its envelopes operation to The Camerons Group, as the repercussions from the judgement in favour of a possum, that stopped logging by VicForests, continue to impact the company.

Under the deal, The Camerons Group will buy the Opal envelope machinery and stock. Opal has been manufacturing a million envelopes a day under its Tudor brand. It also offered an overprinting service, and a speciality colour printing envelope service. 

Based in Minto, NSW, Camerons is an offset print business, and established envelope manufacturer, producing a range of correspondence, custom and colour envelopes. It is currently celebrating 60 years in business, having been founded in 1963 by current owner Troy Cameron's grandfather.

One of Australia’s largest envelope manufacturers, Opal has been producing traditional correspondence, pocket, wallet and banker-style envelopes for retail, printers, mailing houses and commercial stationers. It also serves the direct mail segment through specialty envelopes, folding, overprinting and warehousing capabilities. 

With the “unplanned” ending of wood supply to its Maryvale Mill forced on it in December by the adverse judgement agianst its logging contractors, which ended white paper production, Opal had no locally produced raw material to manufacture envelopes. It put the business up for sale six months ago.

The scope of the sale takes in the business’ footprint, which covers Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. Opal’s manufacturing and overprinting of envelopes will conclude by October.

Opal says the sale comes, “as a direct result of the VicForests supply situation”. It says following “a robust commercial process” it decided to sell envelope manufacturing machines and stock from its Australian envelope business to The Camerons Group.

Opal has not been able to find a buyer for its Stationery business, which for the same reason as Envelopes also went up for sale in April. It is committed to running it until the end of the year, to produce the full range of Back to School stationery. It is currently importing all its materials, and will make a decision in the first quarter of next year on whether to keep the operation going, based on imported product.

Opal was sourcing all logs for its white paper operations at Maryvale from VicForests. Late last year, in a case brought by environmentalists, a Supreme Court judge effectively ordered the end of logging. Maryvale was unable to source new supply. It has since closed three of its five paper manufacturing lines at Maryvale, with the loss of dozens of jobs, as it stopped producing 200,000 tonnes of printing and copier paper, all of which is now being imported. It is still producing its ‘brown’ packaging grades.