Deal Brief Materials & Chemicals - Laddawn

Deal Highlights

• Laddawn manufactures plastic bags and films for packaging applications, including poly bags, re-closable bags, tubing and sleeves, film and sheeting, mailers and accessories, as well as custom products. It offers its products online, with a proven, unique-toindustry e-Commerce web and mobile sales platform.
• Berry is a leading global supplier of a broad range of innovative nonwoven, flexible and rigid products used every day within consumer and industrial end markets. Berry, a Fortune 500 company, generated $7.1 billion of sales in fiscal 2017.
• “In Berry Global, we found a partner who could take our e-Commerce advantage and our people, further than we could go alone. Those opportunities were important to us," stated Ladd Lavallee, President of Laddawn.

Market Outlook

• This transaction represents another high-profile acquisition in the plastics and packaging space, with  consolidation accelerating on a global scale.
• The sale also highlights a major trend in the packaging industry; large players  recognizing the market demand for short-run, custom packaging serving consumer end-users. 
• This represents a strong business development opportunity for IMAP to leverage the deal in the flexible packaging market, with a high-profile buyer and strong valuation story.

Valuation Summary

• Laddawn has a proven track record in delivering strong organic growth; generating over $145 million of net sales for the twelve months ended July 31, 2018. It has 380 employees, with 5 manufacturing sites spread across the United States.
• While EBITDA multiples range from 5-9x for this market, CSHW achieved a significant premium in this transaction.

IMAP Approach

• CSHW achieved every one of the shareholders’ transactional objectives, including maximizing enterprise value.
• By leveraging its deep knowledge of the plastics and packaging sector, along with its expertise in e-Commerce, CSHW was able to appropriately position Laddawn as a technology-enabled, custom packaging provider, in an extremely competitive process that included both private equity and strategic bidders. 
• This transaction represents a very successful outcome for a company that is uniquely positioned in the industry to take advantage of consumer and e-Commerce trends. 
• Laddawn represents the 10th successful transaction for CSHW in the packaging space, and the 4th e-Commerce-related transaction over the past 3 years.

Client Comment

Ladd Lavallee, Co-President, Laddawn:

“We expected the people of CapstonePartners to be smart and hardworking, but we discovered they were also genuinely good and caring. We'd use Capstone again and again because of their character, as much as for the very good results they achieved.”