The country’s biggest magazine publisher is up for sale, with Are Media’s private equity owner taking offers for the business it bought five years ago, and which prints almost all of its product at IVE.
Are Media is the business created from the merger of the country’s two main magazine publishers, Bauer Media and Pacific Magazines, five years ago. The Bauer business was better known as Kerry Packer’s ACP Media, which Bauer bought in 2012. Eight years later, it bought its main rival Pacific Magazines, and then just a few weeks later sold the lot to Mercury Capital for a knock-down sum.
Altogether, Bauer spent $565m on its Australian magazine portfolio, but sold the business for less than 10 per cent of that, Mercury buying it for $50m.
When the two publishers merged, IVE, which had the smaller Pacific Magazines account, managed to win the new enlarged account, while its main rival at the time, Ovato, which had been printing all the Bauer titles, was left with nothing from the merger, and collapsed two years later.
Mercury Capital also acquired the Bauer New Zealand business at the time, which was also that country’s biggest publisher. Mercury owned Blue Star NZ, the country’s biggest heatset web printer. It also bought the Ovato distribution business.
Are Media publishes most of the country’s biggest magazines, including Women’s Weekly, Women’s Day, New Idea, and Better Homes and Gardens. Its last financials were published in 2022, with losses of $10m on revenue listed as $337m.
Whoever buys Are Media will almost certainly stick with IVE as the printer, as there is little in the way of options following a tumultuous five years from 2017-2022, in which IVE acquired AIW and Franklin Web, while at the same time, Ovato acquired IPMG, and then the expanded Ovato fell over, with IVE buying what was left of it.