Sells Agfa Monotype to buyout firm TA Associates for $169 million.
Agfa has quit the font
business and announced it has sold its Agfa Monotype subsidiary to TA
Associates for $169
million.
Agfa Monotype, the well-known provider of fonts and font software, will
now be called Monotype Imaging. The move is meant to help Agfa better focus on its prepress and
printing markets.
“The sale represents the unfolding of a plan our management team started
four years ago,” said Agfa Monotype President and CEO Robert Givens in a
prepared statement. Givens said he will remain president and CEO of Monotype
Imaging, and that the firm’s senior management team and staff will remain the
same under TA Associates.
“Although we’ve been successful as an Agfa subsidiary, we realized that
as a software company focused on consumer electronics, office printers and the
end-user font market, our core competencies differed from those of Agfa, which
has a rich history of providing prepress solutions to the graphic arts
industry,” Givens said. “Agfa has been supportive in our efforts to separate,
which led us to TA Associates, a Boston-based global company ideally suited to
partner with us to expand our business and provide capital for new
opportunities.”
Monotype Imaging will remain in Wilmington, Mass., with regional offices
in the U.K., Chicago, Redwood City, Calif., Japan and China. It will continue to
support the Monotype typeface library, which includes the Arial and Times New
Roman typeface families, among others. The company sells its products via seven
different Web sites:
Graphics Tools 
