Load-shedding forces Alberton Boulevard business to close its doors

After 19 years of progressively serving the Alberton community and surrounding areas, an Alberton Boulevard-based printing company, Copy 2 Print and DTP 2 Print jointly operational, has sadly closed its doors permanently.

With many businesses feeling the brunt of this crippling load-shedding, the printing company took a major blow and has been left with no choice but to call it a day.

As a result, at least 15 employees lost their jobs due to the company closing its doors. At some stage, the company which has, over the years, grown from strength to strength had 49 employees.

A disheartened owner of Copy 2 Print and DTP 2 Print, Erik Storm, told the Alberton Record it is going to be a tough time ahead of them.

In one incident where Alberton was without power for about two weeks, he said they dug deep into their pockets and were over-strained as they had to hire a big generator to keep their doors open.

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“Change is part of life, and I guess this is just another change. For safety reasons, we said ‘let’s liquidate’. We looked forward to the winter and I could see that load-shedding stage six wasn’t going to work. These machines use a lot of power, and the input cost was too high as well as fuel,” explained Storm.

Storm said load-shedding actually began more than a decade ago, and that it wasn’t too bad then.

“During Covid, we survived and we were quite lucky, and even after Covid the work was there, but if we couldn’t deliver on time, that was an issue. The whole economy is going down. Where a customer used to order 250 business cards, they would now order 100. Calculations don’t fit anymore,” he said.

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Copy 2 Print and DTP 2 Print, combined, went from R10-million to R4-million in the last financial year as a group though expenses stayed the same, if not, went higher.

“I love Southern Africa and I love the people here, I’ll continue to stay in the country. We had a very good and long relationship with the community and with our many clients; for sure they’re all very taken back. Our whole aim was to take 24 hours to complete our work, but I couldn’t do that within 24 hours because there were not enough hours to work in,” Storm said.

Though he took a major knock from this, he said moving forward he will weigh his options and find other alternatives in order to keep his head above water.

Those who had already placed orders with the company are urged to contact Erik Storm via email on admin@dtp2print.co.za to make collection arrangements.

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