Stonebridge Technology Associates Advises New England Typographic Service On Joint Venture with EON PreMedia Pvt. Ltd.

February 26, 2008 – Stonebridge Technology Associates (“Stonebridge”) announced today that it acted as financial advisor to New England Typographic Service in connection with its formation of a joint venture company with EON PreMedia Pvt. Ltd. of New Delhi, India.

Client Background

New England Typographic Service (NETS), based in Bloomfield, CT, is a leading provider of outsourced production and development services to publishers of elementary and high school educational textbooks and related materials. Over the last several years, the Company has expanded its scope of service offerings as part of a strategy designed to accelerate revenue growth and establish NETS as a full service provider of editorial, design, composition, prepress, iMedia, and project management services. The Company serves virtually all of the major elementary-high school publishers including such prestigious clients as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson plc; and Scholastic Corp.

Stonebridge Role

NETS engaged Stonebridge Technology Associates back in 2006 to assist the Company in exploring various strategic options to respond to the rapid consolidation among educational publishing companies and a growing desire on the part of these entities to benefit from lower cost, offshore publishing services resources. Stonebridge assisted NETS in evaluating a variety of strategic options that included, among others, acquiring an offshore entity, raising growth capital from an offshore strategic partner or forming a joint venture with an established offshore services provider. As part of this process, Stonebridge identified, profiled and prioritized prospective partners based in India and Southeast Asia and contacted a variety of these entities on behalf of NETS. 

Transaction Rationale

Ultimately, NETS decided to form a jointly owned company with EON PreMedia Pvt. Ltd. of New Delhi, India (EON). This allowed NETS to establish both an ownership interest in and greater operational control over the Company’s offshore production resource. EON, one of India’s fastest growing new media companies, provides outsourced creative graphics and interactive media services to a wide variety of end-use customers. The jointly formed company, NETS EON India Pvt. Ltd. (NETS EON), will focus exclusively on providing offshore page production publishing services to educational textbook publishers. NETS EON will allow NETS to offer its customers a low cost, high quality direct-to-India service capability along with a competitive hybrid service solution that leverages NETS’ US-based project management, client interface and quality assurance capabilities and NETS EON’s offshore production capabilities.  

About Stonebridge Technology Associates

Stonebridge Technology Associates focuses exclusively on meeting the unique investment banking needs of early stage and emerging growth technology companies. The group specializes in providing merger and acquisition and private capital raising advisory services to software, hardware, Internet and technology-leveraged service companies. Stonebridge Technology Associates is a division of Stonebridge Associates, LLC, a FINRA-registered broker dealer that provides creative solutions to the corporate finance needs of middle market and emerging growth companies. Visit Stonebridge at www.stonebrtech.com.