Customers could face shortages of fabrics by upmarket brands such as Sanderson and Morris & Co after Storm Desmond flooded a factory in Lancaster owned by Walker Greenbank, the maker of posh wallpaper and cloth.
The company said Desmond damaged equipment and stock at its Standfast & Barracks fabric printing site on the river Lune. Digital printing is expected to restart early next year but it will take until the end of April for the majority of printing capacity, which includes traditional rotary and flatbed processes, to resume.
Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated the cost of damage done by Storm Desmond at £500m – almost double the cost of the floods that hit the UK six years ago. Stagecoach, the rail and bus operator, said last week its bus service in Cumbria and the north-west of England was under water and that Storm Desmond had also hurt its Scottish business.
Other companies affected by the storm included McVitie’s biscuit factory in Carlisle and James Cropper, a paper maker whose Burneside factory in Cumbria was damaged.
John Sach, Walker Greenbank’s chief executive, said the company had stock stored at warehouses in Milton Keynes but that some fabrics would be in short supply as those supplies were sold.
“I think that will happen,” Sach said. “We hold huge amounts of stock at Milton Keynes but … as the weeks go by, we will have shortages.”
He said Walker Greenbank, whose other brands include Zoffany and Harlequin, was looking to outsource some of its printing to maintain supplies until the factory is up and running again.
Sach said it was too early to know the full extent of the damage to machinery, stock and other property caused by four feet of flooding at the nine acre site two weekends ago. Because of the disruption, pre-tax profit for the year to the end of January will be about 15% less than the £8.8m expected by analysts and trading will also be affected in the next financial year.
Sach said Walker Greenbank’s insurance covered loss of profits as well as damage to equipment, stock and other items at the factory, which employs about 200 people, and that it expected to recover all the lost profits. The site is now completely dry and electricity has been restored.
“The storm came on Saturday night, the flood was on Sunday morning and within 24 hours it had completely disappeared,” he said. The last time the factory flooded was in 1994 when about a foot of water seeped in but before that no one at the company can remember anything similar, he said.
Shares in Walker Greenbank fell 4% to 203p.
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