US-based Sun Capital Partners has made a second acquisition in a week through its European arm with the purchase of Polestar UK Print.
Hunter Ruthven
Magazine printers Polestar produces colour supplements for newspapers as well as printing titles such as Top Gear, Grazia, Cosmopolitan, Hello and Country Life. It produces 40 million magazines each week.
Polestar was formed from the merger of the media businessman Robert Maxwell’s British Printing Corporation and Watmoughs in 1998. Maxwell died in 1991, four years after launching a failed bid to acquire Manchester United Football Club.
The deal follows Sun Capital’s buy, through Sun European Partners, of Britton Flexibles last week from HSBC Holdings’ private equity business.
Barry Hibbert, chief executive of Polestar, comments: ’It will provide further investment and partnership with an organisation that has extensive experience in supporting market leading companies.’
The acquisition, for an undisclosed amount, achieves an exit for shareholders, BlueBay, JP Morgan, Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Contrarian Capital.
Benjamin Buerstedde, vice president of Sun European Partners, says that the deal is significant in terms of Polestar’s position among the UK publication printers, specifically on the ’time–critical’ end of the market.
