Industry Transformation – December 2025 M&A Activity
- graphicartsadvisors
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
SOURCE - The Target Report
Transformation versus Convergence
For much of the past decade, industry transformation has been framed as a destination: printers becoming packagers, converters becoming platforms, legacy printing businesses adding promotional products and other services to become one-stop shops. December 2025 suggested something more sobering and more demanding, as illustrated by two very different reciprocal strategic moves. Transformation, as illustrated by two transactions announced during the month, has become a continuous process, one that requires companies not only to enter new markets but to know when to turn sideways or exit them as well.
ProAmpac, the PE-backed, financially engineered consolidation vehicle focused initially solely on flexible packaging manufacturers, announced the acquisition of TC Transcontinental Packaging. This transaction does not merely shift ownership of assets; it marks a major inflection point not only in the corporate strategic arc of ProAmpac but also in that of the acquired division’s corporate parent, TC Transcontinental.
ProAmpac: From Aggregation to Leadership
ProAmpac’s origins are familiar to anyone who has followed private equity in packaging over the last fifteen years. ProAmpac was engineered from inception to be acquisitive. Its earliest iteration was not simply as a company, but a strategy, a disciplined roll-up, assembling a portfolio of flexible packaging converters with complementary footprints and customer bases. In its early years, the approach was straightforward: consolidate the fragmented, but growing, flexible packaging business.
What distinguished ProAmpac over time was its refusal to remain in that lane. In 2016, Wellspring Capital, the company’s initial PE sponsor, handed off the ProAmpac platform to Chicago-based Pritzker Private Capital (PPC), which reset the capital base and enabled the next decade of oftentimes frenzied acquisition activity.
One of those acquisitions was the purchase of the Rosenbloom Group, a Canadian company that manufactures bags, including plain brown bags, printed and branded grocery bags, bread bags, grease-resistant bags for French fries and donuts, fast-food takeout bags, and wine bottle bags. Millions and millions of paper-based bags - unpretentious, simple bags. This was a notable departure from the company’s positioning as a leading-edge producer of flexible packaging and pouches. This was the moment ProAmpac shifted from seeking market density to optimizing for market breadth. With this transaction, ProAmpac began diversifying and expanding its product offerings, marking the start of a strategy to acquire companies with a broader range of packaging products to serve its current and new markets (see The Target Report: Bags, Pouches, Trays & Bowls – December 2020).