Mergers & Acquisitions

RR Donnelley & Sons Company announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Courier Corp.

Peter Schaefer, a Partner at New Direction Partners, covers merger and acquisition transaction trends for the first quarter of 2015.

Peter Schaefer, a Partner at New Direction Partners, highlights the results of New Direction Partners' Printing and Packaging Stock Index for the First Quarter of 2015.

Peter Schaefer, a Partner at New Direction Partners, discusses the results of NDP's EBITDA Trend Chart for the first quarter of 2015.

If you are in the market to acquire, chances are excellent right now that the type of company you want exists and is in play. Even with the maturing and consolidation of the industry, the base remains remarkably diversified in terms of process, product and sales volume. As we and our other New Direction Partners colleagues have been reporting recently, M&A activity around these companies is finally back to its pre-recession level—a strong signal to buyers that the time to act is now.

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.

Fontis Solutions has been acquired by Dallas-based franchisor Safeguard Business Systems, a Deluxe Corp. company.

DOME and American Web have entered into a formal agreement in which DOME will acquire intellectual and physical assets.

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.