Lots of off-line comment about our story ‘Texas Digital Sold To Radiant Systems [1]‘ first published last Friday. Even with a weekend in between thinking about this (and other acquisitions) it’s probably far too early for us to comment in much detail just yet but “yes what most of you have been saying is correct”…
[2]
- Two years ago (Sept 2009) NCR bought Netkey [3]† (we believe that NCR paid several million for Netkey)
- NCR bought Radiant (July 2011) for USD 1.2 Billion [4](yes BILLION)
- Radiant bought Texas Digital (last week). We have no idea how much they paid but we’d expect the transaction to show up on NCR SEC filings in the next two weeks (unless it was under a million dollars)
Bottom line I guess is that NCR now own two digital signage companies. NCR no doubt plan to turn Radiant into a new business division that is focused on the hospitality and specialty retail sectors – Texas Digital brings it of course ‘menu systems’.
We are now starting to see some real consolidation (the EnQii-Minicom Digital Signage [5] merger for example). We think this is all incredibly good for the industry AND that’s not all – there are two Canadian companies and one other in NYC that we are hearing M&A rumours around.
Perhaps more important than all of that is the fact that we now have lots of large, well funded corporates seemingly take this whole space much more seriously (NEC, Harris, Intel, NCR perhaps).
It’s certainly going to be interesting to see what (else) NCR does with its acquisitions.
†Dave Haynes [6] pointed out that NetKey had earlier acquired Webpavement [7]. Much earlier in fact as we all show our age and admit that it was August 2007
2 Comments To "Why Make A Trillion When We Could Make… Billions?"
#1 Comment By oldsignguy On 5 August 2011 @ 19:43 @863
this is a good sign for the industry. Now if some laggards could go away in the same manner, maybe we would see some innovation.
#2 Comment By Richard Lebovitz On 8 August 2011 @ 15:51 @702
If I’m not mistaken, didn’t Texas Digital also have an arrangement with the Signarama franchise similar to the Scala/Fast Signs supplier arrangement? If so, this also adds an SMB angle to the speculated acquisition. We haven’t heard how well these franchise partnerships have turned out, but the traditional signmaking franchises certainly need the expertise of the digital signage partners to make a successful go of selling digital signage to their existing clients. There’s just a heckuva lot more to deploying and operating dynamic digital signage than printing and posting static signs.