Compass Report--The State of M&A

Wall Street has turned its back on the printing industry. If your company is public, the story needs drastic improvement. Section 5 of the report details the decline in public company stocks and their underlying performance ratios.

Unfortunately, our industry remains highly fragmented—segmented into a multitude of specializations ranging from tickets and coupons to billboards—and the profitability and growth of fragmented industries are hard to track. Who can accurately tell us if short run, perfect-bound book printers have an average return on investment (ROI) of 8 percent or 80 percent? Who knows for certain whether earnings growth for long run, gravure label printers is 3 percent or 30 percent?