Fairfax Media NZ is quietly abandoning plans for a greenfield print site in Auckland with the announcement that it will outsource work to rival APN’s Ellerslie plant.
The two publishers have announced a “proposed agreement” under which the Ellerslie plant in Auckland’s south will print the Waikato Times, Sunday Star-Times, Sunday News and other community papers.
Fairfax was to have moved a press from the closed Tullamarine (Melbourne) print centre and additional equipment from Sydney to equip a new plant in Auckland (see GXpress report, August 14, 2013). Instead, it will contract work to APN, where the large Goss HT70 press which anchors the Ellerslie site was upgraded as part of a $40 million programme last year.
APN has also moved printing of several of its own titles to the site, and has for some time, promoted the concept of capacity sharing in the city.
Fairfax says work from its Auckland and Hamilton sites would move to Ellerslie “within three months from August 2014”. The Hamilton site – where equipment includes a manroland Uniman press and Ferag mailroom including inline inserting – was put up for sale last year.
Chief executive Greg Hywood says the agreement “made absolute sense” for the company and was in line with “fairly common practice” overseas: “In this instance, we boost our print capability in the upper North Island market without the need for significant capital investment and gain significant benefits from the additional scale and efficiencies,” he says.
Hywood says Fairfax will continue to invest in print “where it makes sense” as it had at Petone, where the print site is being upgraded with former-Tullamarine equipment.
APN chief executive Michael Miller says the arrangement makes use of spare capacity at Ellerslie – where the daily New Zealand Herald is printed – and will enable it to deliver further cost savings. It is “on track” to achieve a further $20 million in cost savings across its publishing businesses in 2014.
Peter Coleman