The Top 25 Magazine Printers

Magazine printers look to weather a ‘perfect storm’ of challenging market conditions.

April 2008 By Matt Steinmetz

multipage

Highlighted by Quebecor World’s bankruptcy-protection filing, and rising postage and paper costs, the past year in the magazine printing market has seen a number of developments that continue to resonate throughout the industry. Doron Grosman, president of Quebecor World’s U.S. Magazine Division, called it a “perfect storm”—with printers and publishers challenged by ballooning postal rates, considerable pricing and supply issues in the paper market, and “market resistance to both circulation and advertising growth,” he says.

In its annual review of the magazine printing market, Publishing Executive sought the insights and opinions of executives from several printers who appear in this year’s Top 25 Magazine Printers list. Each of the executives interviewed here offered varying levels of concern about current market conditions, while at the same time reaffirming their optimistic outlooks for the long-term prognosis of magazine printers. Publishing Executive also sought commentary from columnist Steve Frye, an expert print buyer, on many of the same issues.

This year’s Top 25 Magazine Printers list (click on the thumbnails below to see the full list)—the industry’s most comprehensive ranking of leading magazine printers in the United States and Canada—bears a good deal of similarity to our 2007 rankings. Despite the magazine printing market being dogged by more uncertainty and confronted with more challenges than at any point in recent memory, just two printers on the list reported declines in magazine printing revenue last year.

Volker Petersen, President and CEO, Brown Printing Co.
What are some of the changes or trends you’ve seen in the magazine printing market over the past year?
Petersen: I think … there are three major issues. The first is that, overall, we have seen some volume decreases, and we definitely have some overcapacity in the marketplace that has continued to erode the pricing. Some of the pricing erosion that we have seen … has then also really led to some instability in the marketplace and problems for some of our colleagues.

Paper is the second trend. The overcapacity there has been greatly reduced over the last year. Last summer, about a million tons of production was taken out of the system … which … caused significant tightening of the supply—so much so that even some projects had to be canceled because paper couldn’t be purchased. And that’s now causing the paper’s pricing to increase significantly, so much so and so quickly that a lot of publishers and catalog companies have a really hard time adapting to the new business environment. I’m afraid that these paper-price increases are [happening] too fast, and are not allowing the industry to really accommodate and adjust to these prices.