Tuesdata: Don’t mention the printing press

Tim Burrowes

August 26, 2025 7:34

Welcome to Tuesdata, written for Unmade’s paying members.

Today: IVE Group delivers strong results but how much of the profits for this “diversified integrated marketing communications company” actually still comes from print? And a bad day on the Unmade Index.

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IVE holds the press

Considering it’s the biggest printer in the country, IVE Group sure doesn’t like to boast about it.

The casual reader of today’s financial year results update, or listener to the analysts’ briefing call, could have been forgiven for overlooking its print roots altogether.

Indeed, IVE Group’s annual report, also published today, only includes the word “printing” 14 times within its 155 pages. The word “marketing” gets 20 mentions. Not a single picture of printing presses, shiny or otherwise, features anywhere in the annual report.

Instead, it boasts of being “Australia’s largest and most diversified integrated marketing communications company by a considerable margin”.

IVE Group is certainly large. Revenue for the 2025 financial year was $955m (down 1.6% on the year before). EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation) was a decent $137m, up by 7% for the year.

There was lots of good news for the market. IVE Group’s Covid-era takeover of number-two print player Ovato is now wrapped up with “cost synergies fully realised”. Retailers, including Coles, are being tempted back into printed catalogues.

And yet, just like Ooh Media’s positive update last week being punished with a 10% downgrade, exactly the same occurred for IVE Group today. It’s hard to say what the market didn’t like about the company’s outlook. Not many companies have a market capitalisation smaller than their annual revenue.

What’s difficult to tell about IVE Group is what proportion of the profit of the business is still driven by the unglamorous world of printing. It doesn’t disclose that.

Third party logistics is a growing part of the business, which means what it describes as “supersites” in Melbourne and soon Sydney. IVE remains committed to growing its shopper site Lasoo, which is yet to reach profitability. It also has a marketing agency arm.

But the one thing the financial disclosures do not offer is any breakdown of what different parts of the business deliver.

At one point in today’s investor call, CEO Matt Aitken sounded almost apologetic about print. At the start of Covid, Coles and Woolworths both stopped distributing printed catalogues which was a huge blow for the print industry. Coles has since come back.

Making the case that IVE Group had generated research showing the marketing effectiveness of catalogues, Aitken told the call this was not sentimentality about print, but evidence of its effectiveness.

It’s clear that the trajectory of IVE is to move ever further away from print. The word “acquisition” appeared 35 times. I bet that will be acquisitions in the logistics and marketing space, not more printing presses.