Business Management - M&A

Braden Sutphin will manage GFI Innovations’ paste and flexo ink formulation dispensing solutions lines.

Mohawk and Arjowiggins Creative Papers will share their manufacturing facilities, expertise and proprietary technologies.

Acquisition activity in the commercial printing segment picked up. As we have predicted in our last two annual projections, wide-format printing companies continue to be attractive targets for commercial printing companies which seek to cross-sell the new services into their existing clients. As a bonus, the acquiring company adds new clients for their traditional printing services.

As an investment banker to the printing and packaging industries, New Direction Partners has participated in scores of such transactions. While no two mergers were exactly alike, all of them followed a five-part sequence of events that we recommend as a model to all of our clients seeking to merge with other companies.

Vision Integrated Graphics has Acquired fellow Illinois direct marketing firm, Tobe Direct. Tobe’s facility and staff will be retained.

One of the most useful research tools we have at New Direction Partners is our printing and packaging stock index. With it, we track the stock price performance of nine printing companies and the seven top packaging companies from 2006 to the current date. We then can compare trends in the two segments with what has been happening on a more macroeconomic level by looking at them next to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the S&P 500 Index.

Several feature articles in the June issue illustrate ongoing hurdles—and discuss subsequent solutions—facing many printing companies today. Take our cover story on Kirkwood Printing, which has grown into a $72 million performer since being acquired a decade ago by three veteran salespeople who had worked at Acme Printing, a New England establishment once revered throughout the industry for its high-end reproduction capabilities.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one...so three Quebecor World sales guys are driving around during their lunch hour one day, circa 2003, and stumble upon a commercial printing business they knew well: a company with an outstanding reputation, a firm that represented a golden opportunity for the trio to strike out on their own and start anew. The company: Kirkwood Printing.

NextPage, a printing and marketing firm has acquired Print Big Solutions, reported the Kansas City Business Journal.

The owners of Proforma Signature Solutions have announced the acquisition of Artistic Printing and Specialty Advertising.