#Gpa america label expert serial

Faced with the need to embark on another cycle of investment in increasingly sophisticated capital equipment, owners instead want to exit ownership, take chips off the table, and retire from the business. Funds seeking a coherent investment thesis have landed on packaging as a desirable and suitable business to which they can apply this basic roll-up strategy.ДЄs in other segments of the printing industry, aging owners of folding carton manufacturers often do not have a qualified or interested next generation to pick up the mantle of leadership or that want to assume the financial risk inherent in private company ownership. Buy a good sturdy company, add on an appropriate acquisition, remove duplicative costs, institutionalize the back-office functions, and repeat.

With low interest rates and plenty of cash sloshing around the economy, old-fashioned financial engineering has been replaced by the platform-and-bolt-on strategy. Packaging, in general, has several of the characteristics that many funds seek: recurring revenues, reasonably predictable margins, diverse customer verticals, and a highly fragmented landscape of companies to acquire, many of which are privately owned and operating in the fertile ground of the lower middle market. While the folding carton business may never experience the frenzy of activity occurring in the label business, nonetheless increased consolidation in folding cartons is now underway and, in our opinion, is likely to increase.ДЄs with labels, the fuel igniting the fire in folding cartons is the institutional capital injected into the market by the multitude of private equity funds seeking to differentiate themselves and put their investorвЂ™s money to good use within limited time frames. Activity will be most pronounced in the lower middle market that is populated by mature privately owned businesses. Operating now as DazPak, the new entity incorporates the former acquisitions of Action Packaging and Signature Flexible Packaging, and certainly is in the hunt for more.ДЄs we noted in our September annual review of M&A activity in the printing, packaging and graphic communications industries, our expectation has been that the super-heated acquisition activity in the label and flexible packaging businesses would likely be mimicked by an increased rate of consolidation within the folding carton manufacturing segment. Capital, the global behemoth fund and no stranger to print-centric businesses, has rebranded its new flexible packaging platform simultaneously with the purchase of TechFlex Packaging in Gardena, California. The Jordan Company, a PE firm with deep experience in packaging films and paperboard mills, acquired Five Star Holding, a Texas-based group of companies that produce flexible packaging, printed films, and plastic bags. C-P Flexible Packaging, with financial sponsorship of First Atlantic Capital, acquired Bass Flexible Packaging.

#Gpa america label expert serial

All American Label & Packaging, with backing from Heartwood Partners, merged with Western Shield Label & Packaging, itself a serial acquirer of label companies. The activity in the label and flexible packaging segments continues unabated, month after month, and March was no exception.

As the market becomes more crowded with competing PE platforms, several roll-ups were inevitably themselves rolled up in secondary and tertiary buys (see Private Equity Fuel$ Consolidation of Label Industry вЂ“ September 2021). Merger and acquisition activity in the label and flexible packaging printing and converting segments has been on fire, with several PE-backed roll-ups competing to pick up family-owned and managed companies.