Michael Hart

Who Owns SMG?
June 1, 2007

The first time I heard that SMG might be changing hands was back in the second week of April. Just as is the case with many of our news stories, the original tip came from somebody who knew a little bit, some of it wrong, but enough to make it seem like it might be worth pursuing.
That tip entered the realm of what I think of as might-be-stories. For every single story that makes it to either Tradeshow Week or this Web site, there are at least a dozen that are still out there somewhere between wild speculation on somebody’s part to awaiting just one more confirmation.
The latter – awaiting one more confirmation – is where that SMG sale story is today.
After hearing that first tip a month and a half ago, all of us TSW editors began slipping a question about it into many of the conversations we had with sources. It began to sound more and more solid.
As of last week, the unconfirmed report was that SMG, owned jointly by Hyatt Hotels and Aramark, would go to American Capital, a financial player involved in lots of businesses. On background from people not directly associated with either SMG or American Capital, we learned a lot of the details – but none that were really important, like why, how much money was involved and, most importantly, whether it was actually, finally, really, definitively true.
At the end of last week, my colleague Heidi Genoist called everybody who would be in a position to say – on the record – whether the information was accurate or not. She was in the middle of that process when one of our competitors, Tradeshow Executive, sent an e-mail to readers and posted a story on its Web site saying the American Capital acquisition of SMG was a done deal, but attributing no one.
The best we could do that day was an on-the-record statement from a real live spokesperson at American Capital saying it was absolutely not a done deal, that talks were at a sensitive stage and there would be nothing definitive to report for at least a few weeks. That – from an on-the-record source – is what we have reported so far.
So you tell me, who owns SMG today?

Posted by Michael Hart on June 1, 2007 | Comments (0)