Page 40 - Print21 Nov-Dec 2020

Profile
AAB Holdings, which owns two of the biggest printers in New South Wales, is looking to a digital future as it celebrates 20 years
in business. Print21 editor Wayne Robinson asks CEO Wayne Finkelde how he sees the next 20.
AAB celebrates 20 years
Twith digital vision
he national printing Over the past two decades the industry of today is company has continually invested in markedly different to technology, Finkelde says, “We have that of 20 years ago when changed, the business is completely Woolworths spun off different, like many businesses in 20
its printing arm and sold it to AAB years. The equipment we had years
overheads, and really with hindsight, thank God we did, with Covid. So it worked out to be a good decision”
With four offset presses at Blacktown, including two 10-colours and a massive Roland 800 large format press, the group has offset firepower that would be at the top of the New South Wales league table. The Roland 806 was bought from a printer in Melbourne, and when it first came in, it was working two single‐shifts a week on large format work. Now, two years later, it is printing five double‐ shifts, producing POS, display bins, posters, and the like.
The company as a whole is selling around $85m worth of product a year. It has 220 staff across the
two sites, with a flat management structure. Michael Shultz is general manager running SOS, and Sam Carter is general manager at Pegasus. The business is run like a public company, with monthly reports and quarterly board meetings. Finkelde says, “We like to think we can look
at something and make a decision reasonably quickly. The business is structured to be fairly agile.”
Holdings. Then there would have been 100 or more A1 presses in the state; today there are a fraction of that number. Smartphones hadn’t been invented, and Australia had a thriving car manufacturing sector.
But AAB was a solid business.
At the time, it was half a printing and half a food operation. The new owners brought in Wayne Finkelde to run both businesses, and within four years it had acquired two or three other printers, including the well-known MAPS from Bruce Mears on the other side of town. Eight years later the food business was sold off, and the company began
to consolidate its print operations into its Blacktown site. It is still there today, except for the small- format digital division, which was consolidated into the SOS Print + Media site in Alexandria following its acquisition two years ago.
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ago has all gone. It’s all different technologies; we have moved with the times. We are a lot bigger in digital since we acquired SOS Print + Media.”
Back in 2000, the company was predominately offset and screen printing, with some digital and label packaging printing. Finkelde says, “Now we still have those,
we just don’t have the screen. We have offset, packaging, labels,
large format digital, and a lot more warehousing than we used to have, which we use for print management on behalf of customers. We have about 20,000 square metres.”
Streamlining has been a key theme for AAB – the offset side has reduced its capacity. When it came to SOS, Finkelde says, “We moved the offset press
here, and we moved some of the other peripheral equipment, all the work offset got absorbed into Blacktown. And we reduced our costs and