Printing and related support activities

The pre-screen called this a classic acquisition target, and on the surface it is: 2,276 of 3,124 Canadian establishments — 73% — have fewer than ten employees [A], owners are retiring, the customers are local businesses that reorder, and shops sell for low multiples with the equipment included. The screen's test is whether the recurring work recurs at the same size, and the largest printers say it does not. Quad, one of the largest commercial printers in North America, reported 2025 net sales of US$2.4B, down 9.4%, or 4.8% excluding the European business it sold, citing lower print volumes and lower paper sales; it guides 2026 down a further 1% to 5% and earned an 8.1% adjusted EBITDA margin [A]. In Canada the picture is milder: Transcontinental's Retail Services and Printing sector took C$1,057.7M in fiscal 2025 against C$1,069.7M, a fall of 1.1% — but acquisitions and a favourable dollar covered an organic decline of C$30.6M, which the company puts down to lower flyer-printing volume, partly from the Canada Post labour conflict; the sector's adjusted operating earnings before depreciation and amortization were C$202.4M against C$201.0M [A]. So the buyer of a print shop is buying a cash flow that shrinks a few percent a year, secured on presses whose resale value falls with every other shop that closes. Price is set by the customer, because there are too many presses and an online printer is one click away. The low multiple is not a bargain; it is the market pricing the decline. The survivors the subsector profile names — labels, packaging, wide format, fast-turnaround digital — are real, and a full study of one of those as a specific shop would be a different and fairer question than this group-level screen can answer. The software sold to printers is screened separately.