THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 5, 1997 TAG: 9702050450
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 46 lines
Standard Forms Inc., a 70-year-old Norfolk-based company that was on the cusp of a public stock offering last fall, has has been sold instead to a larger office-supplies outfit.
Standard's parent, SFI Corp., and a Springfield, Mass.-based sister company called Hano Inc. were purchased last week by U.S. Office Products Co.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. But Don Platt, chief financial officer for Washington-based U.S. Office, said Standard was the biggest of 13 companies acquired last week by his company for a total of about $150 million. The price for the acquisitions included $1.8 million in cash and $148.1 million in U.S. Office stock.
Standard and its sister company, which provide forms and forms-management services to businesses, had an estimated $110 million in sales in 1996. That was nearly one-third of the $343 million in annual revenues for the companies U.S. Office acquired.
Platt said U.S. Office plans to maintain Standard as a separate subsidiary. He said Standard's administrative and sales offices and its forms-production facility, which employ a total of about 65 people in Norfolk, will continue operating.
Standard, which was founded in Hampton in 1927, had been majority-owned since 1988 by New Yorker Tom D'Agostino. Under him, Standard expanded from annual sales of about $30 million, largely through the purchase of more than a dozen smaller companies in the forms printing, design and management fields along the East Coast.
D'Agostino decided last year to capitalize on that growth by taking SFI public through a stock offering. SFI selected three underwriters and drew up a detailed registration statement to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
But shortly before the planned filing late last year, U.S. Office initiated buyout discussions with D'Agostino, said John Paris, an attorney with the Norfolk law firm of Kaufman & Canoles, which has been Standard's general counsel.
``The discussions got serious enough that the decision was made not to file for awhile,'' Paris said. Eventually, the two companies reached a sale agreement, and plans for the offering were dropped.
U.S. Office, which itself went public in February 1995, is a nationwide distributor of office products and services. The company expects sales of more than $3 billion this year.