One of the two largest printing companies in Australia, GEON, went into administration, and finally collapsed earlier in 2013.
They had a vast amount of high capacity printing gear, and it was all auctioned off towards the end of May 2013. There were auctions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
All but one large capacity press was sold to overseas buyers, mostly from China.
Australian printing companies will be rejoicing that a large chunk of the over capacity that has led to ridiculously low pricing and consequently, unprofitable trading, has now left our shores.
There is an emerging trend that with the maturing of digital printing, more and more shorter runs will be produced digitally, with many printing companies choosing to have longer runs printed overseas (see my blog on this subject) in order to remain competitive.
You can read a summary of the results of the GEON auctions here. It makes interesting reading.