CCL Industries Inc., the world’s largest pressure sensitive label converter, has announced it has acquired wine label specialist Druckerei Nilles and its related subsidiaries. Nilles is a private company located in the heart of Germany’s wine producing region on the River Mosel. In addition to its wine label business, the company enables European customers in many other end-use markets to purchase custom designed labels online using proprietary e-commerce software, more than 500 domain names and digital printing.

Nilles’ 2014 sales are estimated to be approximately $15.7 million with an adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 million. The transaction enterprise valuation is $17.3 million in cash, assumed debt, pension liabilities and deferred equity compensation.

Geoffrey Martin, president and CEO of CCL Industries Inc., comments, “We are delighted to welcome the Nilles family to CCL. This acquisition complements our growing presence in an important global market; Germany is the eighth largest wine producing country in the world posting consistent growth over the last five years. The Nilles wine label business will trade as CCL Label from the beginning of 2015 and report into the Food & Beverage sector headed by Guenther Birkner, president. The e-commerce initiative will continue to be headed by James Nilles and become a new business unit of Avery Europe led by Mark Cooper, vice president & managing director.”

Martin continues, “The Nilles e-commerce platform complements the ‘WePrintT’ initiative Avery recently launched in the United States on www.avery.com. This new service gives consumers and small businesses options to either print labels and cards from our cloud-based online design tool using pre-formatted Avery products on their own desk top printers, or to have them professionally produced and shipped directly from Avery. Nilles offers a similar online service to higher volume customers with more complex label requirements on a roll, in special sizes and materials. Ultimately we expect to make both of these new capabilities available on a global basis using either our Avery brand or one of the many domain names owned by Nilles, such as www.label.co.uk and www.etikett.de. This expands the role of our company, direct marketing quick response capability to all kinds of end-use label customers, taking advantage of our scale as the largest user of digital print engines for labels in the world combined with our proprietary online design software and e-commerce tools.”

CCL Industries employs approximately 10,400 people and operates 98 production facilities in 28 countries on five continents. The company’s corporate offices are in Toronto, Canada, and Framingham, MA, USA.