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Acquisition-hungry Scottish Radio Holdings has snapped up

Manchester-based poster company Signways for pounds 4.15 million in

cash.

Since March, SRH, a radio and press owner, has muscled its way on to the

outdoor scene by acquiring Glasgow based Trainer, Bristol-based Parkin

Advertising and Birmingham-based Vision Posters. SRH has added 450 sites

in Manchester to its roster as a result of the Signways purchase.

Signways will become part of SRH’s Score Outdoor division, which was

created earlier this month.

Score’s sales strategy is to sell under the original company names on a

regional basis, while selling a variety of national packages from a new

centralised sales house in London. Signways’ sales team will stay on

after the acquisition, although managing director Frank Follows has

retired and will be replaced by the Score management.

Last year, Signways generated pre-tax profits of pounds 84,000 on a

turnover of pounds 1,225,000, a margin of just under 7 per cent. But

Chris Trainer, chief executive of Score, was confident margins would

improve.

’Outdoor is a great business to buy in to at the moment,’ he said.

’Especially in the medium-term given the fragmentation of TV. There’s no

reason you can’t be working on a 30 per cent margin.

’Signways has superb locations,’ Trainer added, ’but there is potential

for investment in areas such as illumination.’

He said he was relatively unworried about buying into outdoor at a time

when a ban on tobacco advertising is imminent. ’We’ve known about it for

a long time, and we have now reduced our dependency to around 5 per cent

of our turnover.’

Outdoor rivals acknowledged that Signways was a good buy ’at a good

price’.