The country’s second largest print group, which includes Hannanprint and Offset Alpine among its companies, posted a modest profit of $2.37m.
This was a vast improvement on the $77m loss it recorded in the 08/09 year due to significant write-downs of goodwill, real estate and other assets.
IPMG chief executive Stephen Anstice told ProPrint that while the lack of any major impairments over the period helped the company return to profit, underlying earnings were also slightly better.
“Economic conditions improved as the last year went by, but remember that we were comparing against a terrible year before. 2008/2009 was really terrible. It was the depths of the financial crisis,” he said.
The company’s headcount fell by 150 year-on-year from 2,084 on 30 June 2009 to 1,934 on 30 June 2010.
These were largely redundancies from the closure of distribution business NDD, which IPMG closed in June following a loss of work to rival PMP.
Anstice added that, excluding the NDD shutdown, overall staff numbers were actually slightly up.
IPMG’s cash position was significantly down from the year before, with cash and cash equivalents falling from $58m to $8.7m year-on-year.
Anstice also put this down to the NDD closure. “NDD holds both publishers’ money and newsagents’ money until it finalises the sale of magazines so the closure results in a reduction in our cash holdings.”
He added that the reduced cash was also due to higher stock holdings thanks to the increased levels of business in June 2010 compared with June 2009, as well as machinery investments.
“We made quite a few investments in web presses and new bindery equipment. We installed new presses in Sydney and Brisbane, and new binderies in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane,” said Anstice.
He said the company was expecting stronger trading in the coming year. “Much of it is determined by what happens in the November to January period, but at this point I’d be very surprised if that the 2011 financial year wasn’t better than 2010.”
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