Comments on: The Industry Shake Out

By: Terry Scannell

Terry Scannell — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:02:25 +0000

I agree with Jeff’s post here. From my understanding the founder of Clarity (an Oregon business person who help found InFocus) was smart enough to buy Coolsigns after the venture capital people who originally funded it threw up their hands. The venture people had invested tens of millions. Rumors on the street at the time of the Clarity purchase of Coolsigns were that Clarity paid only slightly above $1.0 million for Coolsigns ( a great price if true).

Planar another Oregon LCD firm bought Clarity as Jeff points out. Planar has invested substantially in Coolsigns and made some great improvements to it. But the $46.0 million was not paid just for Coolsigns. No one will really know what value Planar put on that portion of the Clarity acquisition.

Planar’s major strategic blunder was when it bought a high end home theater company right at the top of the housing bubble for around $40.0 million in cash. That acquisition has not gone well to say least the least and this has forced Planar to start selling of chunks of itself. Last quarter or so it sold off its medical display business. Now as reported they are trying to sell Coolsigns.

By: Adrian J Cotterill

Adrian J Cotterill — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:16:52 +0000

Jeff, thanks for the clarification, you are correct, our mistake in using Clarity and Coolsign as one and the same.

When Planar bought Clarity/ Coolsign – the USD 46 million was mostly for Clarity’s
display business AND only a portion could be directly attributable to the CoolSign line of business. When Clarity bought CoolSign from AdSpace we believe that it was valued slightly north of USD 46 million.

We will amend the post later to correct this.

By: Jeff Collard

Jeff Collard — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:48:11 +0000

Two points that I would like to clarify for your readers:

Planar did not spend $46M to purchase CoolSign, they purchased Clarity in 2006 who one year earlier had purchased CoolSign. I don’t think that the price of the CoolSign acquisition was published but I believe that the current asking price is a significant increase in value (well beyond market growth in the past 3 years).

There are several companies in this space with long histories and strong balance sheets. One should not assume that VC funding is a prerequisite for success in the digital signage industry.