Strong M&A activities in the textile digital printing space The textile printing market is undergoing a transition from conventional printing (rotary screen or flat bet printing) to digital printing (ink jet printing), which will enable manufacturers in the textile processing industry to shift from mass scale long-run to on-demand manufacturing, responding to the increasing demands for fast fashion by short production runs and customisation. Current growth rates (CAGR) in this industry are approximately 20%, but the overall market penetration of digital prints in printed textiles is still low – below 3%. In the European market the penetration is higher due to trend of small run lengths in a high cost environment and ecological concerns which favour digital printing over conventional printing. In 2014/15 some key mergers and acquisitions took place in the digital textile printing sector. Stepchange Innovations GmbH has been involved in some of these transactions as technology advisor in the due diligence process. Private equity financial investors as well as strategic investors and large US corporations have entered the technology driven European digital printing space. Generally, the mergers create companies with the market reach and financial power of large global corporations blended with the technical capabilities and know-how of specialist companies. More specifically, these transactions included Investcorp – SPGPrints In 2014, the Bahrain-based investment firm Investcorp acquired SPGPrints Group BV, based in the Netherlands, for an enterprise value of 240 mio € from Dutch Bencis Capital Partners. SPGPrints provides printing products such as screens, lacquers, inks and printing systems to the textile and graphics industries. The company is global market leader of screens for rotary screen printing, a pioneer in digital printing and an important player in digital inks for textile printing. SPGPrints reported revenue of 214 million € in 2013. EFI – Reggiani EFI (Electronics For Imaging), a US corporation based in Fremont, California, acquired Italian Reggiani Macchine, based in Bergamo, in a deal worth around €125 million. Reggiani has 190 employees and customers in 120 countries. Reggiani‘s inkjet technologies, which will be rebranded as EFI Reggiani, address the full scope of advanced textile printing. Their versatile digital printers are suitable for water-based disperse, acid and reactive dyes inks as well as pigment inks. EFI is a leading manufacturer of industrial UV-inkjet printers and digital inks, a leader in print industry workflow solutions and has a large global sales and marketing platform. EFI is a public company traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange (ticker symbol EFII). EFI´s brands include various printing systems such as Vutek and Matan superwide digital inkjet printers, wide formate printers, Etrion industrial digital label printers, Cretaprint® inkjet printers for ceramic tiles with Genuine EFI Cretacolor Inks, Fiery® proServer color management system, Fiery® Wide Format Products as well as productivity software. Sensient – Xennia Sensient Technologies Corporation, a US corporation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has acquired Xennia Technology Ltd., a UK manufacturer of specialty inks used in digital printing. The merger creates a company with Sensient’s market reach and Xennia’s technical capabilities. Sensient´s annual