A brief email from fifth-generation family member Cassie Hannan to GXpress notes a change of address for former IPMG executive chairman Michael Hannan.

His relocation to a building in the Sydney eastern suburb of Edgecliff - bought two years ago by a family company for a reported $11.2 million - also coincides with a new role as a non-executive director of PMP following decades of building up the print and digital group best known for its Hannanprint brand.

A merger with high-volume heatset rival PMP has taken years to get past regulators, but became a reality in February, after that of Franklin Web and AIW into IVE had also been approved.

Michael Hannan told GXpress he was "very pleased" to have finally been able to merge IPMG with PMP after 16 years of trying and excited about what this will mean for the merged company.

"There are very significant efficiencies to be achieved that could never be achieved by either of us if we had remained separate," he said.

It's a sign of the times that two businesses which took decades to create are now being taken apart and reassembled in weeks: At PMP, reorganisation is already underway with the closure of the Noble Park, Melbourne, site announced - with two more closures expected - and Offset Alpine in Sydney earmarked for sheetfed-only production.

IPMG's flagship supersite at Warwick Farm in Sydney's west - now four years old - may be one of the more enduring components. It replaced the plant in Alexandria which had brought my first contact with the growing group and Michael Hannan when I was a Melbourne-based trade magazine editor in the late 1980s. A top apprentice returning from his celebratory tour of Australian print sites was the first to tell me of the Hannanprint operation where he had been "blown away" by levels of automation which included robot reel-carriers, weaving their way around the building. The location was the former British Oxygen site in Bourke Road, acquired in 1986, where the 11 hectares provided ample room for expansion, and formed the basis of what later became the Sydney Corporate Park.

Pretty soon I was in Sydney to meet Hannan and his technology head, and make the first of several visits to the plant, then noted for its twin-web Harris heatset presses, advanced workflow... and robot-driven reel room. The little Goss Community in the corner - with its stripped-down tricolour UOP unit - also resonated with my own publishing past.

And provided a link to the family's earlier days, to an early print shop and to the Randwick District News established in the 1930s by Norman Hannan, son of "founding father" and Irish immigrant Francis Hannan who had opened a butchery in the suburb in 1887.

The Hannan story in print, publishing and property dates to those events, and the early 1970s technology of the Community newspaper press would have played its part in the creation of Hannanprint, and paved the way for its evolution into magazines and heatset production. Logical then that the family would play its "trump card" and make the Double Bay Courier and its sister titles - by then part of a publishing partnership with the Packer family - the first suburban papers to appear in glossy full colour.

A rival in the heatset market had been Dubbo-headquartered Macquarie Publications, and it seemed almost no time that - as then editor of Ink Magazine - I had published a story about their foray into Victoria, with a fresh-faced John Armati on the cover, that Hannanprint had added those sites to their growing business.

Later that decade, Earl Baskerville's Inprint in Queensland, Craft Printing and Sinnott Bros joined the group, as did Offset Alpine Printing, once owned by the Packers but famous for different reasons arising from a disastrous fire.

Those were the days of significant rivalry between magazine publishers such as Packer's ACP... and for their business. Hannanprint also dates to 1990, the start of its exclusive print contract with Fairfax, later to upset the publisher's plans - following its merger with Rural Press - to bring heatset production inhouse.

IPMG was formed in 1998 as an umbrella group for the family's varied print and publishing interests, expanded in 2002 through an agreement for its Federal Publishing unit to take on Vogue and a host of other high-profile Condé Nast titles in Australia.

But as the Hannan family was able to buy out its 50/50 partner, John B. Fairfax's Marinya Media, the clock started ticking towards its exit from publishing. In late 2006, it quietly sold FPC Magazines - a 25-strong stable replete with everything from the glossy Weekender freesheet that Hannan had launched in the holiday haunt of Noosa, to the upmarket Vogue titles - to News Limited (now News Corp Australia) together with its Courier Newspapers suburbans.

At the time, Michael Hannan spoke of the "blindingly obvious" reality that the brands would be more attractive to an owner with the resources to develop them. It's the same logic which was behind the sale of the Sydney Corporate Park, and appears also to have driven the IPMG-PMP merger, which had been earlier knocked back by the ACCC and eventually abandoned in 2001.

Now the Hannan family - whose wealth was estimated at $410 million in the BRW Rich List - have a different role in the merged PMP, in which they will retain a substantial holding. Between them, the shareholders of IPMG, Michael Hannan and Lindsay Hannan - who are fourth-generation family members - and Adrian and Richard O'Connor, will own more than a third (up to 37 per cent) of the expanded PMP business after new shares have been issued. A number of family members still work in the business.

Michael Hannan says the family has an important stake in PMP "now and into the future" and while he might be moving from executive chairman of IPMG, "I am very pleased to be a non-executive director of PMP and to see a number of IPMG's best executives working alongside the best executives from PMP.

"It is indeed an exciting moment and extremely good for the industry we operate in."

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Michael Hannan (left) and Lindsay Hannan (pictures IPMG)