Advertising giants APN Outdoor and oOh!Media are both competing over Adshel, the outdoor media divison of Here, There & Everywhere (HT&E), with APN making a $500m bid for the business across Australia and New Zealand, topping oOh!’s $470m offer.
No agreement has yet been reached with APN, it says there is no certainty its proposal will gain any traction. The bid is still subject to a range of conditions including due diligence, definitive agreements and regulatory approvals from the ACCC and NZCC in New Zealand.
The move was made after oOh! confirmed it made a second revised proposal for Adshel on April 30, valued at $470m. It had been turned down earlier that month for making an offer that HT&E said was too low. HT&E offered to engage with oOh! to value Adshel and raise their price on the latest proposal, but the company declined.
Adshel’s street furniture network, which it claims as the largest for any advertising network in Australia is attractive for APN as its seeks to grow. The company says it also expects there are a range of value accretive cost synergies in combining the two.
[Related: oOh! bid for Adshel turned down]
The latest outdoor media figures show street media including bus shelter print continuing to grow, in the last quarter Roadside Other, covering street furniture, bus/tram externals, small format and excluding billboards is at $55m, up from $51.1m.
Adshel’s FY17 results show its revenue for digital grew by 23 per cent to $65.7m in 2017 from $53.6m the year before. Although print remained the majority source of income for the company at 50 per cent while digital was 30 per cent, revenue for the print sector went down to $110.9m last year from $112.1m the year before.
The company has also said it is looking to expand further into digital media, with plans to further digitise its street furniture network.
APN and oOh!Media’s battle over Adshel comes after the two rivals’ $1.6bn merger was called off last year, with the ACCC raising concerns around the dominance of the out of home advertising market.
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