The KBA Comet press from News Corp Australia’s Gold Coast site will be crated and stored for reuse; the much bigger manroland Colorman from Fairfax Media’s Chullora site is likely to be scrapped.
These are the facts of life as newspaper publishers throughout the developed world come to terms with reduced circulations and advertising, and those in ‘developing’ countries buy new kit to meet the demands of their own growth.
Fairfax is still looking for a buyer for the 22-tower Chullora pressline, and without one is likely to scrap it in order to vacate the premises and realise an estimated $50 million valuation on the real estate.
Printing of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review has now been switched to the company’s upgraded North Richmond print site, following similar arrangements for The Age completed early last month from Tullamarine to Ballarat. There, Fairfax has spent $18.5 million on an upgrade which enables it to print two 96-page tabloids including 32 pages of heatset colour.
Most of the ten-year-old manroland Geoman line has been used in the Ballarat and North Richmond upgrades, with one complete press allocated for an upgrade in Petone, New Zealand.
Innovative engineering sees double-width webs from the removed presses combined with single-width ones from the existing Uniset presses at the two regional sites, with group printing and distribution director Bob Lockley saying “the biggest trick” has been running webs from the ten-year-old Geoman towers into the Uniset at full speed.
The concrete-and-glass print centre beside Melbourne’s Tullamarine freeway is for sale, with data centre and disaster recovery group White Data reported to be offering $25 million for it.
Lockley says the $42 million cost of the upgrades in Ballarat and North Richmond is expected to pay back in a year, without proceeds from the sale of buildings.
In Queensland, News Corp Australia is close to completing an $13 million upgrade of the four 20-year-old manroland Newsman 40 (Colorman) at Murarrie, to which production of the Gold Coast Bulletin is currently being switched. State-of-the-art manroland and QI Press Controls technology has been installed on the presses, one of which had been idle since July 2012.
manroland web systems is replacing drives and control systems to provide much of the company’s autoprint functionality – including inline control systems, production planning, start-up automation, monitoring and reporting – while QI Press Controls has installed its IDS closed-loop automatic colour density control and register systems. News is the first user of the QI IDS system in Australia – since also ordered by Fairfax Media for the North Richmond – and has it running successfully in Sydney.
The nine-tower KBA Comet press, installed in 2003 with Ferag mailroom, is likely to be mothballed. National production and logistics director Geoff Booth says the The decision to close “the best equipped site in the country” was a difficult one, which eventually came down to management and property overheads. “When we had the ability to run four presses in Murarrie, to move everything into the Brisbane site just made financial sense.”
Only about 15-17 of staff from the Molendinar, Gold Coast site – noted for its “extremely progressive” culture – are expected to move to Murarrie. A measured approach to moving work across – while freeing staff for training including Certificate 3 and 4 manufacturing – saw some work put out at one point to Fairfax Media’s Ormiston plant in suburban Brisbane.
Fate of the 144-page KBA press, which is similar to the smaller Comets in Darwin (64pp) and Hobart (96pp), is uncertain: “We’ve got tons of options for it,” Booth says. “Putting it into any of our multipress sites makes no sense at all, and it doesn’t solve any problems for me.
But it might later: “It’s not for sale,” he says.
Peter Coleman