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Thank you, Rémi. And I’d like to also welcome
everyone to this important event that brings us all here today.
The plant, which you’ll be able to tour in a few minutes,
has an area of 153,000 square feet and is equipped with the
latest technology for black and white book printing. Not only
has our investment preserved existing jobs, it has added 70
others, for a grand total of 325 employees, which makes Transcontinental
a major economic partner of your region and consolidates our
position as Canada’s leading book printer.
We will continue to serve an impressive list of Quebec and
Canadian publishers from Louiseville, but more than half the
products we print will be for the U.S. market. Combined with
the modular reorganization of our plants, which will allow
for shorter production times in a one-way workflow, from order
taking to delivery, our investment at Louiseville will lower
our costs and help us reduce the negative impact of the stronger
Canadian dollar on our exports. It will also translate into
ever shorter turnaround times for our customers. I’ll
return to this shortly.
A project of this scope obviously requires the contribution
of many people and organizations. Rémi mentioned the
extraordinary support we have had from local political and
business representatives. This support has been unflagging
since last June, and I thank you for it. Once the project
was launched, however, it was our people who carried it forward
on a daily basis while preparing the best possible transition
between the old plant and the new one. Allow me to salute
the members of this fine team:
- François Olivier, president of Transcontinental’s
Printing Products and Services sector, which is responsible
for printing, books, newspapers and commercial products,
as well as our Mexican activities.
- Jacques Grégoire, senior vice president of the
Book Group, who spent a lot of time on-site supervising
the project. In fact, Jacques, I’ve been told that
Louiseville is thinking of making you an honorary citizen!
- Gaston Marcoux, who was responsible for the worksite
and who monitored progress on a daily basis. Naturally,
Gaston knows every inch of the plant.
- Richard Lafrenière, general manager of Transcontinental
Gagné, who, with his people, made sure that production
continued through a transitional period that posed all kinds
of challenges.
- Gaston Alarie, the plant controller, a discreet but absolutely
indispensable person, especially for a major project like
this one.
- Michel Handfield, the union representative, and the entire
team at Louiseville At Transcontinental, it really is the
people who make the difference!
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Behind a project like the building of a new plant lies a
corporate strategy. I’d like to say a few words about
ours.
First, we specialize our plants and aim to be the best in
each of our niches. For example, in book printing, we have
focused on short and medium runs. The primary strength of
our network, the largest in Canada, is that we can offer our
customers a complete set of products and services. We can
do market tests of 500 copies to runs of 100,000; there are
also reprints, which we can produce in the shortest turnaround
times in the industry. We also produce books in black and
white or colour in all sizes, with hard or soft covers, and
all types of bindings.
Over the past few years we have successfully developed short-run
digital printing. We print about a hundred books a month that
have an average run of 800 copies. Time to delivery is barely
10 days.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the threat that
emerging countries, such as China, pose to Canadian corporations,
as well as the impact of the stronger Canadian dollar. Without
denying this dual challenge, I’d like to point out that
at Transcontinental we have significant advantages when it
comes to competing: our expert, dedicated and motivated workforce,
our corporate culture based on being close to our customers,
our major programs to invest in new technology and the reorganization
of our plants into a modular structure where everything can
be done in less time.
Our investment at Louiseville is a concrete illustration of
this approach. Not only will we cut our costs, but we also
plan to reduce our cycle times by half, which will give our
customers greater flexibility in the market. They will be
able to do a small run to test the market and, if the response
is positive, to place a larger order that we can deliver very
quickly.
So Transcontinental is in an excellent position to deal with
global competition. And we will do it from Louiseville for
many years to come!
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In closing, I’d like to reiterate that Transcontinental
is taking steps to keep growing in a targeted and disciplined
manner. In 2006, we’ll be investing $130 million in
the latest technologies, and even more when you add in our
media activities. We have the financial capacity, the strategy
and the people to do so.
Thank you for your attention. |
