After the acquisition of Mumbai-based Alia in May, the premedia agency is taking a new step in its international expansion by acquiring one of America’s leading graphic production companies.
Diadeis is proud to announce the acquisition of Graphic Systems Group, an independent American graphic production agency. For more than 30 years, GSG has been the partner of choice for many of the world’s leading brands, including L’Oréal, Novartis, Abercrombie & Fitch, Avon, and NBC. The company is entrusted with a wide range of mission-critical campaigns from special promotions to full-scale production consolidation. Founded in 1980 as a photographic retouching and fine art graphics specialist, GSG is now New York’s pre-eminent independent creative production agency, offering multilingual packaging mechanicals, premedia, digital, visual merchandising and software implementation.
Diadeis is already well established throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This increased presence in North America helps the company cement its position as a leading international player in the design and premedia industry. This purchase places Diadeis amongst the top 3 global players in the industry by strengthening its ability to meet the needs of the leadingbrand owners across all their markets.
“The United States is the leading market in consumer packaging,” explains Jean-Charles Morisseau, Diadeis’s President. “This must be taken into account if you want toearn international recognition. In order to get established in this market, you must be able to offer a comprehensive service and have the means to take on substantial projects.By incorporating GSG’s teams we can henceforth meet all of a brand’s needs in America.”
This acquisition marks Diadeis’s second big purchase of this year, with the company already having bought Alia, the main premedia packaging agency in India, in May. With 150 employees located in India, South Africa, Singapore and Dubai and significant key accounts such as Unilever, Mondelez, Kellogg’s, GSK, etc., Alia was the main premedia packaging agency in India.
“It has also seen strong organic growth in Europe thanks to, amongst others, the success of decoupling, a process which has been implemented by top multinational companies such as Nestlé, Unilever, Mondelez and LVMH. This technique for optimizing market processes involves separating in advance the communication media creation phase from the premedia stages such as adaptation, multilingual artwork and reprographics. “By using a single agency like Diadeis, brand image can be unified across all communication media and all over the globe, providing the client with quicker time-to-market and costs reduction, explains Sethunath Padmanabhan, Diadeis Alia’s Managing Director. ““Diadeis’s strength has been its ability to pre-empt leading brand owners’ needs when they had to go from local management to launching products abroad,” continues Jean-Charles Morisseau. “We offered tailor-made solutions in terms of both processes and tools to manage their ever more complex marketing projects. It has not just been our technical skills that have been the key to our success, but also our ability to guide our clients through this change and develop IT tools for graphic chain management.”
A philosophy shared by GSG who followed the same reasoning in the United States and offered similar services to multinational companies. “With this merger, our clients will now be able to benefit worldwide from our full package of services,” explains Jan Stollerman, GSG’s Managing Partner. “Being able to globally manage a campaign efficiently and simultaneously has become a crucial factor in the industry, and we are proud to be able to now offer this option.”
Diadeis employs more than 600 people around the world, and is planning to keep strengthening its global footprintby opening several additional subsidiaries across the world in the next few years.
