Five Trends Driving M&A in Wide-Format

A closer look at the factors impacting buying — and selling — wide-format operations in 2025.

Unless you’ve been enjoying a stay under a very nice proverbial rock — or this is your very first time ever reading an article in Wide-format Impressions — the term “convergence” won’t be new. The past few years have seen the pace of mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, sales, generational hand-offs, tuck-ins, and more across the entirety of the print industry as the number of shops continues to decrease, even as the types of projects each shop takes on increases.

Fueling that convergence is the beating heart of buying and selling businesses — mergers and acquisitions (M&A). But beyond just the general trends impacting print and communications, what’s really driving M&A activity in the wide-format space, in particular?

Here is a closer look at five trends shaping the composition of our industry right now, and what it will look like in the future.

1: Going Beyond Print

One interesting trend we’ve been seen gaining traction in the past year or two has been wide-format printers looking to add more than just print to their roster, because they are well-positioned to pick up additional work if they have the right people and technologies. If a wide-format printer is already doing all the signage, wraps, posters, and wallpaper for a brand or campaign, for instance, it makes a lot of sense to also have them do things like the promo products that go with the rest of the creative. Or the packaging. Or the t-shirts for the staff. The list is endless, and that has fueled many wide-format providers to quickly bring in these ancillary services, and ramp them up quickly by acquiring both the technology and the people from elsewhere.

There is much to consider before closing on a sale or purchase. | Credit: Pixabay_Jarmoluk

It goes beyond even the basics, though. Mark Hahn, senior managing director at Graphic Arts Advisors, says, “Of special note recently is the merging and acquisition of companies that are experts in experiential graphics, including elements of architectural graphics, event graphics, and highly developed retail graphic installations.”

These types of services have frequently gone hand-in-hand with wide-format printing, but in the past, one operation handled the printing, and then handed it off to another business that specialized in things like installation or building pop-up structures. Now, brands are looking for a more “all in one” approach, wanting a single point of contact from start to finish. And yes, there are still many printers, installers, builders, and more who are operating independently and partnering for different jobs, but the number of printers who have considered a total package and decided it is more cost effective — and gives them better control over the finished product — to have it all under one roof, is growing.

2: Geographic Diversity

Another massive trend fueling M&A in wide-format is the need to be able to serve much wider geograph regions than shops used to in the past.

In days gone by, nearly every town in the country would have had its own local, family-owned print shop. In bigger populations, there would have been a commercial printer, a wide-format printer, even a copy shop or two. But the print landscape has changed.

There simply isn’t enough work overall to keep that many small wide-format businesses afloat. Sure, they still get the small one-off jobs from other local small businesses, but with costs always rising, and logistics becoming more complicated, those shops have had to start expanding into much wider areas to get enough business in the door to keep the door open and the lights on.

Added to that, national or international brands don’t want to have a different printer they work with in every location they have a store, or a display, or an event. They want to have one printer they trust and partner with, and have that printer handle all their needs — no matter where the physical print will end up.

This has led many wide-format printers to start looking at ways to quicky expand their territories, making it far more profitable to do jobs that span cities, states, or countries, as they can produce the work closer to where it will be displayed. This cuts down on costs like shipping, but it brings its own challenges, not the least of which is the cost to get a new division or location up and running with all the equipment needed, and the people to run it.

It’s usually far quicker and less expensive to find a great wide-format printer in the geographic location they’re eyeing, and bring them into the fold, be that by merging, acquiring them outright, or one of dozens of other approaches that can be used.

And some of that also goes back to the first trend — events happen everywhere, but being able to support those events with the right wide-format print, installation, and support could be challenging for an operation with only one location hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Hahn notes, “Entrances to event spaces are created entirely from wide-format capabilities, some of which lead to immersive environments that mimic everything from Nordic climates to western landscapes, among other unique applications. A week later, in a blink, it is all taken down and whisked away. Having a wide geographic footprint enables these capabilities across the US — and for some recent acquirers, on a global basis.”

3: The Technology is Maturing

I still remember the early days of wide-format printing, and to say it was the proverbial “wild west” is putting it mildly. The quality of the print shifted massively from one device to another, the types of substrates that could run through the machines varied wildly, and it was easy to open a new wide-format print shop and differentiate yourself from the competition just by purchasing a single, different piece of equipment. It was experimental, with people constantly pushing the boundaries of the technologies, and building their own brands and reputations around the unique platforms and applications they built.

But the wide-format OEMs never stopped innovating, and the technologies rapidly improved. Today, while there are still differences between eco-solvent, UV, and latex, the differences between two UV presses, or two eco-solvent presses, are mostly around things like workflow or the ecosystem in the shop. The actual output is stunning no matter what press is used.

That’s not to say those same OEMs aren’t still innovating, because they are still always looking for ways to improve and push the industry forward, but the days of being able to differentiate because you are an “HP” or a “Mimaki” or a “Fuji” or an “Agfa” shop are long past. Now, a wide-format printer has to bring much more to the table than just the technologies they have on the floor.

“Digitally printed banners and wraps are no longer unique, flatbed printing devices are ubiquitous, and the high margins that came with being an early entrant, offering large inkjet prints, have been compressed by competition,” Hahn explains. “Entry-level equipment is no longer expensive, flatbed cutters and other finishing technologies are widely installed.

Differentiation in the wide-format business has moved from those that had first-mover advantage to businesses that have perfected more complex online direct-to-customer systems, robust planning and installation capabilities, or value-added services such as printing on canvas for use as home or office décor And even these attributes are no longer sufficient to provide unique differentiation.”

The end result is that there are a lot of wide-format businesses with great technologies and people, but without a strong enough client base to continue to capture business. Tuck-ins, in particular, have seen an explosion of growth in the wide-format space in the past few years, and that’s only going to continue. A tuck-in is essentially where a more financially-stable company wholly absorbs a more challenged one, usually to grow market share, or, in these days where finding skilled labor is increasingly challenging, to absorb the personnel into their own operation.

4: It’s a Post-COVID World

During the pandemic, wide-format printers were suddenly the heroes in nearly every community across the country. They were shifting equipment to produce face shields, masks, floor graphics extolling people to stand six-feet apart, hand-washing signage, and more. Even businesses that had for years exclaimed “print is dead” suddenly remembered why print is such a valuable medium for communication, even in a digital world.

And that bump in activity continued even after the days of quarantines and social distancing were in the rearview mirror, as everyone was trying to figure out how to blend new habits with a desire to return to an older normal, and print remained right in the middle of things.

But now, while the world is just as — if not more — chaotic and uncertain as it was in 2020, the current chaos isn’t the kind that necessarily needs eye-catching print. Brands haven’t completely retreated back to digital — they have learned that consumers do actually respond well to print — but they are looking to be a lot more strategic about it as the cost for print continues to rise.

So many smaller wide-format operations that saw great success in the past few years are now starting to re-evaluate how to proceed in the next few. At the top end of the wide-format space, Hahn notes, companies are engaging in some of the trends above, expanding into areas like experiential graphics, or expanding their geographic footprint so they can compete more effectively on a wider scale, with a wider range of clients. At the lower end, however, those who aren’t adapting quite as fast are beginning to find margins getting thinner, jobs getting smaller, and costs getting larger.

Many, on both ends, see M&A as a way to move forward — the larger companies are looking to grow quickly with established people, technologies, client lists, and reputations they can use to expand, and smaller companies see it as a way to continue to serve their communities and staffs without having to close the doors completely. It can often be a win-win, and that’s a big reason why many are embracing it in this post-pandemic world.

5: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

This has threaded through the other trends, but it deserves a place on the list on its own as well. Brands today, and especially the new generation of communications buyers, aren’t interested in having a vendor for every element. They want their direct mail printer to be their signage printer, to be their experiential printer, to be their promo printer, to be their package printer… You get the picture.

And while many wide-format printers are tackling that mentality by partnering with other like-minded operations that have complimentary technologies and services, acting as trade printers for one another in their areas of expertise, that can add a lot of complexity and cost — not to mention a loss of control. The idea is to allow the buyer to have a seamless experience, where they neither know nor care where the printed elements come from, just that they arrive on time, and at the quality they expect.

Which is why many have looked to M&A activity to merge with or acquire those partners after some time working together. It’s a great way to see the people and processes actually mesh — and that there is enough of a customer base to make the transaction worth it — but ultimately bringing everything under the control of one set of individuals, across multiple locations, means the ability to more tightly ensure every project is perfect and on time, every time.

Ultimately, M&A activity in the wide-format space is gaining momentum. At first it was just smaller companies merging with one another, or a commercial printer looking to expand into wide-format and using M&A as a way to get their quickly. But the types of mergers, the companies engaging in them, and the reasons for them are only increasing over time.