The New Zealand Commerce Commission has received an application from PMP Print to acquire some of the heat-set printing assets of the Manukau site, including the 1996-model Goss M600 and a 2006-model Muller Prima Tandem stitching line.
APN recently announced that it would be closing the Manukau site on 30 November and outsourcing all of its gloss printing work to PMP New Zealand.
The ten-year contract covers APN’s national magazines portfolio – including New Zealand Women’s Weekly, Listener, and Crème – and the gloss magazines and property guides inserted into its newspapers, such as the flagship NZ Morning Herald.
PMP chief executive Richard Alley (pictured) told ProPrint that it was this contract win that is under-pinning the company’s transformation plan, which will be detailed at this Friday’s AGM.
“One of the key features of the transformation is securing this volume,” he said. “You can plan a lot of activity around a contract of this size.”
He added that along with acquiring “selected assets” from the Manukau site, the company will take on “four or five” staff from the Manukau plant.
Allely had previously told ProPrint that the company was looking at purchasing “one additional press” for its Wiri site south of Auckland, but would not confirm that the Goss M600 would be installed at Wiri.
He also described the APN win as “a great outcome” for the company after it lost ACP’s New Zealand printing work to Blue Star.
The Commerce Commission is now charged with assessing “whether the acquisition has the effect of substantially lessening competition in a market”.
The application to the Commission noted that should PMP be unsuccessful in acquiring the assets, “the counterfactual would likely be either acquisition by Webstar or the assets being decommissioned”.
The Manukau plant, which employed roughly 150 people, had long been “treated as a discontinued business for accounting purposes”, according to APN.
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