Fairfax has done a deal with Charter Hall to sell its two metro printing plants for $55m after the newspaper company shut them down last year. While the figure is lower than the $70m Fairfax was hoping to get and far less than the more than $600m it spent to build and upgrade them, the deal means the sites are not sitting idle.

Charter Hall is reportedly in the due diligence phase with the deal to close in the near future. The site in Melbourne’s Tullamarine was built for $220m in 2006, with reports suggesting it will go for less than 10 per cent for a mere $20m after potential $25m deals with other companies fell through. The figure for the 37,600sqm Chullora plant in Sydney – which cost $315m to build in 1996 and another $70m to upgrade in 2001 – is set to fetch the remainder of the $55m. Some 400 staff were left jobless after the two sites were closed down which saw presses either sold, scrapped or move to upgraded regional facilities in Richmond, NSW and Ballarat, Victoria. The regional sites were extended to accommodate the increased print volumes and equipment upgrades, and complemented with new kit including a $30m, three-year contract with Fujifilm to provide plates and new CTP equipment. Fairfax printing and distribution group director Bob Lockley blamed declining print volumes resulting from plummeting circulation for the plant closures. “The plants were great in their day but are now not being fully utilised, so we need to rationalise our operations,” he says. Circulation for Fairfax newspapers has continued to slide, with the Sydney Morning Herald’s weekday copies falling 13 per cent last year to just 115,000, and the Sunday edition down 14 per cent. The Age is even worse, falling 18.3 per cent to 106,843 on weekdays.

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