oOh!Media Sparks a Bidding War After Falling to Multi-Year Lows

Outdoor advertising company oOh!Media spent much of CY26 trading near multi-year lows on soft ad market conditions, before a bidding contest between Pacific Equity Partners and I Squared Capital exposed a wide gap between its public market price and what private capital was willing to pay.

A structural growth story hit by cyclical weakness

Forager Funds' August 2025 case for buying oOh!Media rested on a structural media shift: spend moving from free-to-air and other traditional formats into out-of-home advertising. That structural case met cyclical headwinds through the rest of 2025, with Investors Mutual Limited noting a soft December quarter as shares fell 12.7 per cent on weaker than expected ad market conditions, even as the fund argued the stock, trading below 10 times CY26 earnings, remained an attractive way to play a structurally growing medium and a potential target for industry consolidation.

Shares fall to $0.85, then a bidding war begins

Perpetual Asset Management's May 2026 account captured the scale of the reversal: the stock fell more than a third year to date to a low of 85 cents in late April, pressured by concerns over softer advertising conditions tied to higher-for-longer inflation expectations. Perpetual had started rebuilding its position below $1.00, arguing the stock was significantly undervalued, a view it said was validated first by Nine Entertainment's $850 million acquisition of rival QMS Media on April 1, and then by a non-binding indicative private equity approach.

Two rival private equity bids emerge

Infinity Asset Management's April 2026 update detailed the first approach: an unsolicited, non-binding proposal from Pacific Equity Partners at $1.40 per share cash, valuing the equity at $746.9 million, a roughly 65 per cent premium to the prior closing price, sending shares up as much as 47 per cent on the news and prompting Infinity to reduce its position and take some profits. Lennox Capital Partners reported a second, higher bid arrived in May 2026, a non-binding indicative offer from I Squared Capital at $1.45 cash per share, sending the stock up almost 33 per cent in a single session.

A gap between public and private valuations

Investors Mutual Limited's June 2026 reflection put the episode in a broader context, arguing that private capital and industry players are willing to take a longer-term view on assets like oOh!Media than public markets often allow, and that eventually beaten-down stocks simply become too cheap for that gap to persist. Perpetual, for its part, remains focused on the underlying structural case beyond any takeover outcome, expecting out-of-home advertising to keep taking share from traditional media formats and OML, as the largest player, to be well placed to benefit as contract churn stabilises and development capital expenditure moderates.