Mergers and Acquisitions — When Sweet Turns to Sour

The accompanying chart below shows the range of EBITDA multiples paid for printing companies since 1996. The upper line shows the high end of the range; the lower line shows the bottom range. For clarification, in 2007 buyers of printing companies typically paid somewhere between 4.5 and 6.5 times EBITDA. This is up dramatically from the nadir in 2001 and 2002, when the range was only 2.5 to 4.0 times.