Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
STRATACACHE today announced the acquisition of IZ-ON Media (née PRN) from Technicolor (Euronext Paris: TCH; OTCQX: TCLRY).
Chris Riegel, STRATACACHE CEO and Founder told us “The acquisition of IZ-ON Media complements our growing shopper marketing practice. The IZ-ON Media acquisition is key in our quest to double topline revenue in the next three years.”
In August 2005, PRN was acquired by Thomson for USD 285 million.
In November 2007 Thomson announced that it had separated the Network Operations Services business unit within Technicolor Services into the Out-of-Home business and a unit called ‘Broadcast Network Services’ – basically the Out-of-Home unit consisted of the American PRN retail networks operation, Screenvision US and Screenvision Europe BUT despite that, it took only a few years for a cash-starved Thomson to start looking to offload its acquisition (in October 2008 to be precise).
In April 2009, Thomson hired Goldman Sachs and made many valiant attempts to sell the business for USD 80 million – a fraction of course, of what it was bought for – even then, we believe that a realistic price for the business was more like USD 30 million.
With no takers, and a very unrealistic price, Technicolor announced in February 2011, that it was keeping PRN.
“He’s a proven leader with deep expertise who will continue building upon PRN’s success.” said Lanny Raimondo, president of Technicolor’s Entertainment Services Business Group, in November 2011, when he announced that Ahmad Ouri would be the new PRN president and CEO.
Ahmad did little during his tenure, apart from an ill-advised rebrand of the company from PRN to IZON Media (October 2012) and was unceremoniously booted out earlier this year.
Even pre-Ahmad, when the PRN brand stood for something and they did have a number of retail contracts (other than Walmart), the company failed to find any buyers at USD 20 million.
The financial details of this deal have not been revealed but we’d be surprised if Chris Riegel, a very astute businessman and deal-maker extraordinaire paid anything like USD 10 million for the business. Whilst we wouldn’t go as far to say that Technicolor paid him to take the business off of their hands – don’t be surprised if the real deal amount is more like a few million.
In a skype call with us yesterday Chris Riegel told us that 98% of the staff would be staying on and that, that will include current CEO of IZ-ON Media, Kevin Carbone. Chris is a hard task master so don’t expect anyone who doesn’t like to work hard or offer any value to stay or be kept around.
So that’s it then, one of our industry’s great white hopes. Yours for an over valued, bloated, unrealistic USD 285 million one day, yours ten years later for a ‘fiver’.
July 1st, 2015 at 14:19 @638
Your last paragraph says it all. What does it say about our so called industry that a profitable company with much higher revenue than almost all of the software companies you cited yesterday can be had for so little? Hopefully not so much as it says about the arrogance and idiocy of one large French company.
July 4th, 2015 at 18:00 @791
The PRN “of old” created and held a lot of valuable patents. Even though many companies blatantly encroached for many years, the PRN of old was not interested in becoming a patent-troll. PRN was more interested in being a leader and known for invocations that set high standards in producing large-scale production systems. The PRN of old was always interested in providing quality solutions and working with others to create the DOOH as a legitimate, viable business.
As with most pioneering companies, PRN eventually was acquired by a company who have a different agenda. Yes, the downfall of PRN began with the acquisition but their “death by a thousand cuts”, started when Technicolor thought they could put one of their executives in charge. Was he a competent executive? Yes, for a large bureaucratic company compose mostly of lawyers, but not for a fast moving invocation minded company like PRN.
Jumping forward to today. Why would Statracache purchase PRN (IZ-ON)? Especially since this purchase does not include the intellectual property. Maybe they are looking for a temporary stop-gap solution because they’ve over-committed to Walmart? Maybe they’ve discovered that no matter how much money you throw at a problem, without experienced people the project is doomed to fail
You state that “Chris Riegal told us that 98% of the staff would be staying on and that, that will include current CEO …” I would question — how many of those people actually have experience. PRN was always an engineering driven company, with a strong creative, marketing staff. How many of those people are still there? If truth be total, very few if any!
If Technicolor still owns the intellectual property, this should be a wake-up call to a lot of DOOH companies who have been violating PRN IP; the patent troll is coming!