Haynes to shut HQ and distribution arm as profits take a tumble

The company said the restructuring had forced it to make “difficult” decisions affecting employees though only a “relatively small number of roles” would be lost in its UK business. Its current site in Somerset, which employs around 70 staff, will be relocated to a “more suitably sized premises” while its in-house distribution facility at the same location will be shut down with its work being outsourced to a logistics provider.

Car manual sales have continued to plunge, falling 7 per cent on last year while the company’s general publishing arm’s sales – including books on a wide range of subjects including DIY and even the USS Enterprise from Star Trek – were down 18 per cent.

Haynes is merging the separate divisions into a single UK editorial department which will focus its strategy on the more profitable Haynes Owner Workshop Manuals.

It is also setting up a new global website to develop “trustworthy and practical advice” in a number of different languages and through a range of different devices. This is already available in English.

The company, which employs 280 people worldwide, boasts of having sold 150m manuals throughout the world since it was founded in 1960 by John Haynes.

But sales of the handbooks – regarded as bibles by car mechanics – have been sliding and last year it even sought to blame its decline on the impact of customers spending book budgets on racy novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

Latest results for the year to the end of May – which were postponed from their original publication date last month – showed pre-tax profits dropped 23 per cent to £3.6m on revenues sliding 7 per cent to £27.6m.

Underlying earnings in the UK and Europe halved from £1.8m to £900,000.

The company, which has now completed a strategic review, said it had managed to weather the storm of the economic downturn but there were few signs of the pressures it faced easing off in the near future.

Chief executive Eric Oakley said its current HQ “no longer meets the requirements of a modern information publishing busi- ness”.

He added: “The book distribution market has changed significantly.

“The investment that would be needed to upgrade the UK facility for the requirements of a modern day logistics operation would far outweigh the future benefit to the business.”