FineLine Technologies, a portfolio company of Summit Partners, has acquired Consolidated Printing, a provider of printed tickets for professional and collegiate sporting events and major entertainment and event venues throughout the United States.
Consolidated Printing is a full-service commercial printer that specializes in the design, printing and delivery of event tickets. Customers of the company include organizations and events from nearly every field of the sports and entertainment industries, including teams from professional and college sport, as well as orchestras, ballets, museums, film festivals, awards ceremonies, concerts and tours, television shows and theme parks.
The company was founded in 1974 by Paul and Sherry Brant and is based near Fort Smith in Van Buren, Arkansas. Today, the company is led by co-CEOs Curtis Howells and William McKeever.
“Our customers are increasingly inquiring about smart ticketing and its ability to enhance fan engagement, reduce ticket fraud, and improve security,” said Mr. Howells. “We are proud to say that in 2019 we successfully transitioned more than half of the NFL teams from conventional paper tickets to RFID-enabled smart tickets.”
FineLine Technologies provides barcoded and RFID integrated labels, tags, and badges for supply chain, omni-channel fulfillment, POS, access control, and consumer engagement applications.
Each year, FineLine produces billions of tickets – with high-quality graphics, scannable barcodes, encoded UHF and HF RFID – through its network of print hubs, delivering them in less than five days. The company was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Norcross, Georgia.
The buy of Consolidated Printing provides FineLine with an entry into the event management sector. This expansion is a core piece of the company’s strategy to expand into additional industry verticals which require stringent data management and reporting capabilities, and logistics optimization.
“The acquisition of Consolidated Printing will allow FineLine to offer its advanced data management and RFID production capabilities to the sports, entertainment, and event ticketing industries. Like other verticals, we see this industry moving rapidly from conventional printed tickets to RFID-enabled smart tickets, as evidenced by the NFL’s recent decision to adopt RFID-enabled ticketing,” said George Hoffman, FineLine’s Chairman and CEO. “Since 1991, Consolidated Printing has built an incredible business by providing high-quality tickets to more than half of the teams in the NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA, as well as to some of the most famous events and venues in entertainment, including the Emmy Awards, Madison Square Garden, and Carnegie Hall.”
Summit Partners was founded in 1984 and has more than 100 investment professionals in its offices in Boston, Palo Alto, London, and Luxembourg. In March 2019, the firm held a first and final closing of Summit Partners Growth Equity Fund X LP with $4.9 billion of capital.
© 2019 Private Equity Professional | December 12, 2019
