A Massachusetts-based company has agreed to pay $270 million in cash for a London-based firm that sells anti-counterfeiting products and services.
- The firm is OpSec Security, which has operations at two locations in the Greenfield business park in East Lampeter Township, Lancaster County.
- OpSec had been on a path to go public this year by merging with a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company.
- Now, OpSec and its roughly 750 employees are poised to become part of Crane NXT, a publicly traded industrial technology firm that employs about 4,000 people worldwide and had revenue last year of nearly $1.4 billion.
- The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
Why is this happening: Crane NXT is aiming for $3 billion in revenue by 2028, with growth coming partly through acquisitions, Crane president and CEO Aaron Saak said this week in a conference call with analysts.
- Crane NXT sees OpSec’s products and services dovetailing with its own related technologies, which clients use to combat counterfeiting and other misuse of their intellectual property.
- “We have a small but growing business in physical product authentication,” Saak said. “With the addition of OpSec, we believe we will significantly expand our channel to market.”
- The deal does not include a portion of OpSec’s business known as Zacco, a Danish company that OpSec acquired last year.
- Zacco had sales of $98.4 million in 2022, according to regulatory filings.
What’s next: Crane NXT estimates it will gain about $130 million in annual revenue from OpSec, along with $20 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
- OpSec’s existing management team is expected to continue leading the business as a unit inside of Crane, according to a presentation by Crane NXT.
- More details will be available when the transaction closes later this year, according to a Crane NXT spokesperson.
- “But we can confirm that Lancaster remains an important manufacturing and operational site for OpSec,” the spokesperson said.
The background: OpSec was founded in England in 1983 as Applied Holographics, according to securities filings.’
- It went on to purchase companies in Colorado and Maryland, among other acquisitions.
- OpSec traces its roots in Lancaster to the 1998 purchase of Advantage Technology, a company that had spun out of Armstrong World Industries, according to a 2014 story in LNP.
- Today, the company has locations in Pennsylvania, California, Florida and Idaho, as well as China, the Dominican Republic Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Lithuania, Malta and the United Kingdom, according to its website.
- Its customers include clothing brands, media companies, consumer goods producers and others with an interest in combatting digital and real-world fakes of their products.
- OpSec is owned by Investcorp Technology Partners, a global investment firm that was one of the entities involved in the potential SPAC deal announced last year.
- Investcorp is now mulling a go-public transaction for Zacco.
- Crane NXT formed in 2023 from the split of Crane Co., an industrial products manufacturer based in Stamford, Connecticut.
