中文IVE has officially opened its new Kemps Creek printing supersite, welcoming guests from across the industry to a 42,000 square metre facility that now houses five IVE business units spanning commercial printing, packaging and display print. The greenfield site is the largest investment in the company’s 105-year history, and a statement of intent about where IVE believes Australian print is headed.
The build itself was remarkably quick. Conceived as a collaboration between IVE, property group Mirvac and the Australian Retirement Trust, the project went from signed deal to completion in just thirteen months. It sits inside the sweeping western Sydney development wave that includes the region’s new airport, positioning IVE at the centre of a growth corridor rather than on its edge, close to where population and business are shifting.
Matt Aitken, managing director of IVE, framed the opening as a defining moment. “This is a big night for IVE. This is not just a big shed. This is the biggest investment in IVE’s 105 year history,” he told guests. The tools, he acknowledged, have changed, but the mission has not: IVE exists to enable its clients to get alongside their customers. That mission now has serious hardware behind it, and a layout designed to collapse the distance between different production disciplines.
The packaging and commercial press hall pairs two brand-new B1 Koenig & Bauer presses, a seven-unit double-coater and a ten-unit perfector, with a Heidelberg ten-colour perfector relocated from Silverwater. The Koenig & Bauer seven-unit will print packaging, the ten-colour will handle both packaging and commercial, and both run at 20,000 sheets an hour, with the Heidelberg also printing commercial work. Bobst die-cutting and folder-gluing sit in the same hall. Aitken said the new packaging room was modelled on the best European examples he had seen, and promised that automated robotics would be coming to the site, a signal that labour productivity, not just square metres, is part of the plan.
The digital press hall carries an HP PageWide T370 HD reel-to-reel full-colour digital system and three HP Indigo sheetfed printers, two B2 machines, the 100K and 12000, plus the B3 7900. Brand Activations, IVE’s display print operation, runs a pair of Durst wide-format systems and Zund automated cutting with robotic load and unload. Kemps Creek employs around 400 staff on double day shifts, though it is not IVE’s only NSW site; the group also runs its Huntingwood web-offset facility, a Silverwater web-offset plant and a 3PL centre in Erskinville.
The dignitaries in attendance underlined the investment’s significance. Dietmar Heyduck, global head of sales for Koenig & Bauer, said he was “blown away by the professionalism of IVE” and that the new plant “now compares with anywhere in the world.” That external validation matters in a market where Australian printers have sometimes been painted as behind global standards; a plant that earns praise from a German press maker’s global sales chief is a counterpoint, and a marketing asset in pitches to multinational brand owners.
For IVE the supersite is about more than square metres. By co-locating commercial, packaging and display under one roof with integrated finishing and robotics, the company can offer brand owners a single, simplified supply relationship across formats that previously lived in separate buildings. In a print market where brand customers prize speed, consistency and one accountable partner, that integration is the real product. The western Sydney location also shortens logistics for a population and business base shifting westward, reducing delivery times and freight cost.
The bet also reflects a broader Australian dynamic: population and investment flowing west of the established Sydney hubs, with print infrastructure following. A supersite in Kemps Creek shortens the distance to customers in the growth corridor and to the new airport, while integrated robotics points to where margin will come from as wages rise. For a 105-year-old business, the risk of such a concentrated investment is real, but so is the risk of under-investing while competitors modernise.
Whether Kemps Creek becomes a template depends on execution. The hardware is undeniably world-class; the test is whether IVE can convert that capability into share in packaging and display, segments where brand owners reward reliability and speed. If it does, the supersite will be remembered as the moment a heritage printer bet its next century on integration, automation and a single western-Sydney address.
The strategic wager is that integration beats fragmentation. Rather than spread capabilities across multiple sites and hand-offs, IVE has concentrated them so a brand’s packaging, commercial and display needs can be served from one campus with shared finishing and automation. In a market where speed-to-shelf is a competitive metric, collapsing those hand-offs into a single location is itself a product feature. Kemps Creek is, in that sense, less a building than a business model made physical.
Source: Print21 (by Wayne Robinson), published 4 September 2026.
