Tulsa, OK

TPSi, a major digital document delivery company, announced today that it has opened a new facility in Albuquerque, NM, to serve the western region of the country. TPSi recently signed a contract with PNM Resources, an energy holding company headquartered in Albuquerque that markets power throughout the Southwest, Texas and the West, to produce and mail more than 650,000 monthly bills for its customers.

THERE WILL come a day, sometime soon, when print buyers will come to respect the value that direct mail printers bring to the table in a consulting capacity. As for now, many printers have to be scratching their heads and wondering, “Where’s the love?” Or, better yet, why the lowball? This ain’t a commodity, pal. “I had a client who told me that my printing price was a little higher than the competition’s,” notes Paul Nichols, president of Tulsa, OK-based CP Solutions, a Consolidated Graphics company. So Nichols made the customer a tongue-in-cheek offer: He would print and mail the job for the price

BY ERIK CAGLE Who can forget 1998 and 1999? Those were easily the salad days of merger and acquisition in the commercial printing industry. The dotcom craze was sweeping across all U.S. industries, with venture capitalists seeking new avenues into the printing segment. Wall Street coveted this largely fragmented industry, and a wave of new kids on the block, consolidators, embarked on the IPO-and-roll-up philosophy. Roughly a half-dozen of these consolidators vied for the growing number of printing companies looking to become cogs in much larger machines, seeking either payola or the benefits from the economies of scale. The national economy was a well-oiled

HOUSTON—Consolidated Graphics announced it has acquired the assets of Tulsa, OK-based Regent Printing & Imaging. The Regent operations will be combined with Consolidated Graphics' existing Tulsa operations to form Consolidated Printing Solutions, which will offer both sheetfed and full-web printing capabilities to its customers in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri from new, state-of-the-art facilities. "This is an exciting opportunity for us to expand our capacity and services to new and existing customers in the tri-state markets," notes Joe R. Davis, chairman and CEO of Consolidated Graphics. According to Charles White, president and COO of Consolidated Graphics, Regent's Paul Nichols will assume the role of president of Consolidated Printing