Lloyd’s List #2: Deals of the noughties
Paul Milligan, February 17, 2010
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The last ten years have seen successive waves of merger and acquisition activity change the face of the av market. Peter Lloyd recalls some of his all-time favourites and says why they were important:
Jan-June 2000: Jack Morton International first buys Creation Communications, then buys leading UK live event company Caribiner, starting a wave of acquisitions and sector consolidation in the conference production business. In the next 12months, HP:ICM and PCI Live Design are acquired by ad agency group Cordiant and are subsequently merged.
April 2001: Principals Brian Abrahams and Lillian Cutting buy Greenham Video from parent company Greenham Trading, originally part of Taylor Woodrow. A decade later GV Multimedia is still high on distributors’ best client lists.
May 2001: Impact AV – owned by Swedish and Norwegian backers – takes over MarCom Systems, forming reseller and systems integrator Impact Marcom, now just known as Impact.
May 2002: Long-established dealer Edric AV takes over another industry veteran, Hammonds AV. By 2009 Edric has (a) been taken over by Indeprod and (b) shut down.
July 2002: UK arm of American systems integrator MCSI opens with huge plans, which lead it to buy Mercator and then Quest before failing when its parent company collapses in the wake of massive debts and questionable share dealing.
May 2003: Reflex does an MBO from distribution group VPH (Visual Presentation Holdings), which also owns Maverick and PSCo.
Feb 2005: Barco buys LED specialist Systems Technologies and moves more heavily into the LED display market, which is at the core of its event portfolio for the rest of the decade.
March 2005: Systems control manufacturer AMX, which earlier dumped an attempt to call itself Panja and to address the domestic market, is bought by US conglomerate Duchoissois for $315m.
Nov 2005: Audio Visual Machines (AVM) on the acquisition trail, buying former Noel Edmonds vehicle Video Meeting Company (VMC) as well as taking on staff from defunct integrator ITM. AVM does an MBO next year and goes on to become one of the most active consolidators in the market.
May 2006: Broadline distributor Midwich buys a stake in systems specialist True Colours Distribution. Over the next three years Midwich goes on to concentrate its efforts on a-v and to buy both Owl Video and Invision.
January 2007: Matrix Displays completes the process of separation from original parent company Asysco. By the end of 2008 it has been acquired by AVM and merged into one of the UK’s largest reseller organisations.
Summer 2007: WPP Fitch amalgamates both Clever Media and PCI Fitch into Fitch Live. There are now just two really large event agencies – FitchLive and Jack Morton – against five or six at the beginning of the decade.
Autumn 2007: Maverick Presentations parent company, VPH, has problems and the distributor becomes part of Techdata’s UK subsidiary, Computer 2000.
Autumn 2009: Cisco mounts an eventually successful bid for Tandberg’s videoconferencing business. The move triggers a wave of vcon sector consolidation, with Logitech buying LifeSize and, this year, Radvision buying Aethra. Sony, meanwhile, has withdrawn from the market.
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