M&A activity has picked up in every year since 2009, and that there’s every reason to believe the forward momentum will stay strong.
All told, the content value chain represents a $1 trillion market—and printing is the least profitable piece of it. If the bulk of your revenue comes from printing, you have a major incentive to find new sources in areas of the value chain you are not currently addressing. With the right guidance and the appropriate systems and equipment, you can learn to leverage these lucrative opportunities.
We may be in a seller’s market now, but that can and will change with time. It always does. As with almost everything else in life and business, timing can make all of the difference in the degree of success you will achieve in a sell transaction.
Nobody likes interruptions to their best-laid plans, but they happen—and M&A deal making isn’t exempt from them. When something happens to impede the sale of a company, it’s natural to want to proceed with caution until the obstacle is safely out of the way. Sometimes, that’s the correct strategy. In other cases, it can be a mistake.
It’s said that in business, timing is everything. In an acquisition, it’s many things: some of them controllable, others not necessarily up to the principals. Make the deal clock keep the right time for you by being clear about your objectives and reasonable about your expectations.
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.
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.
If you have reached a decision to sell, don’t delay setting the process in motion. If selling isn’t yet a step you’re ready to take, keep building your business in ways that will bring you to the attention of the private equity players. They’re attracted to companies that show they aren’t afraid to make the investments that set them apart as leaders of the positive change the industry is undergoing.
In some ways, owning a printing company you intend to sell is like investing in the stock market. Because the value of what you own can fluctuate unpredictably, waiting for a market "peak" before you act can be a needlessly risky thing to do. It’s better to begin working with your M&A advisor so that when the right offer comes along at the right time, you will be ready.
Knowing from the get-go exactly what you want to accomplish by purchasing another firm puts you in a winning frame of mind and increases the acquisition's likelihood of success. At New Direction Partners, we know that when a prospective buyer comes to us with a clear picture of the kind of company he or she wants to buy, we can zero in that much more quickly on candidates that will be complementary or accretive to the buyer's present business.
