
© Mikhail Mishchenko - dreamstime.com
A discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic is unavoidable when trying to gauge industry trends for 2021.
During the 2021 NAID & PRISM International Virtual Conference, which took place April 13-15, information technology asset disposition (ITAD), secure destruction and records and information management (RIM) professionals shared their takeaways on how COVID-19 affected the industry and what trends to expect in the year ahead. Speakers included John Shegerian, executive chairman and co-founder of ERI in Fresno, California; Jordan Peace, vice president of corporate development at Access Information Management in Woburn, Massachusetts; and Tom Adams, co-owner and founder of Flourish Press and WebVitality in Lewiston, New York.
Mergers and acquisitions
In the nearly eight years Peace has worked with Access Information Management, he said the company has closed more than 100 acquisitions.
“We’ve been a very acquisitive business,” he said.
After the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, he said the company did not close on any acquisitions in its second quarter of the year.
“We closed on a transaction March 2, which was incredible timing,” he added. “After that, we paused. We didn’t close anything in the second quarter because of travel restrictions. We needed to pause to find new ways to do business.”
Access Information Management resumed acquisition activity in the third quarter of 2020. Peace said the company made 12 transactions that quarter on the storage side of the business, which he said is on par with prepandemic levels. “I don’t know what prepandemic levels mean for everyone, but that was the prepandemic level for us,” he said.
On the shredding side, he said mergers-and-acquisitions activity has been slower to pick up since the onset of the pandemic. As of this year, he said his company is starting to work on some shredding business acquisitions.
“In the future, I think shredding activity will increase in acquisitions, while the storage-related acquisitions will maintain where they are at,” he said of the company's plans.
Data privacy
Even with a global pandemic, customers did not forget their concerns related to data privacy. Shegerian said the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar legislation remained just as important in 2020 as it was before. Businesses continued to think about data protection regulations with more of their employees working remotely in 2020.
He said he anticipates the U.S. will pass federal legislation similar to or tougher than GDPR. He noted that states are already passing their own data privacy laws, including California, Nevada, Maine and Virginia.
“Data security is not going away,” Shegerian said. “It had to be realized and baked into the pandemic crisis. Data security is here to stay, and it will only grow as an issue.”
Shutdown slowdown
With COVID-19, shredding services slowed in 2020. Peace said the 2020 office shutdowns shifted secure destruction customers’ behaviors. On the shredding side, he said revenues from route-based activity dropped between 15 to 40 percent. He noted that companies in some parts of the U.S. were harder hit than others by the shutdowns.
However, he said, shredding business seemed to start picking up again in September 2020. He added that Access Information Management hit prepandemic levels for its shredding revenue in March of this year.
“That’s been encouraging," he said of shredding business returning. “This industry has proved its resiliency.”
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