KPMG Corporate Finance has been engaged to run a formal sale process of Australia’s largest magazine publisher, Are Media, which currently uses one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest printers, IVE Group, to print the majority of its titles.
IVE Group is one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest printers and prints most of the magazine titles published by Are Media
The sale announcement comes just months after Are Media announced a strategic partnership with US publishing group Dotdash Meredith, heralded as a ‘transformational moment’ for the business. That deal saw Are Media as the exclusive commercial partner for DDM’s digital content in Australia, and was designed to significantly expand the publisher’s online reach and advertiser offering. Citing an expanded reach to 10.4 million monthly users and a print readership of 6 million, Are Media CEO Jane Huxley spoke to the partnership giving them ‘unprecedented scale in the verticals and audiences that we care about the most’.
Talking about the latest sale announcement, Huxley says: “We’re excited about what’s next. With the right new owner, we believe Are Media can grow even stronger and continue to lead women’s media in Australia and New Zealand.”
Are Media, which publishes most of the country’s biggest magazines, including Women’s Weekly, Women’s Day, New Idea, and Better Homes and Gardens, is the business created five years ago when Bauer Media Australia (originally Kerry Packer’s ACP Media) bought its main rival Pacific Magazines, before almost immediately selling the merged entity to private equity firm Mercury Capital.
When the two publishers merged, IVE, which had the smaller Pacific Magazines account, was awarded the new combined account, leaving Ovato -IVE’s main rival at the time and then printer of all the Bauer titles – with nothing out of the new Are Media publishing house. IVE went on to acquire Ovato a few years later, on the back of other large acquisitions.
It is too early to speculate on whether the proposed sale of Are Media will have any future impact on IVE, especially given that the Group has essentially acquired any potential competitors capable of printing the volumes likely to still be required by the next iteration of Are Media.
