Analysis: Why NEP acquired SIS Live

NEP Group is by some distance the world’s largest live production facilities supplier, driving high profile broadcasts including Love Island, Wimbledon and cricket’s IPL.

Barely a week passes without news of a significant addition to the US group’s capability in a strategy that has seen its value soar from U$800 million to more than U$2.5 billion in five years.

That coincides with the period in which Chief Executive Kevin Rabbitt has been at the helm. A Harvard MBA scholar with no previous experience of the broadcast or media industry (he joined from a company selling household blinds), Rabbitt has steered NEP through multiple buyouts and successfully integrated each new division into the group’s expanding global operation.

Rabbitt may be in day to day charge but the real power behind the organisation is arguably Deborah Honkus, NEP Group founder, chair and executive director. She began her career in 1978 with Total Communications Systems - a Pittsburgh-based mobile production company with a single truck to its name. In 1986 when TCS merged with NEP, she became general manager of the combined company, serving as CEO until 2012.

By that time NEP was a major player in outside broadcasts but based predominantly in the US and UK and almost exclusively on the supply and crewing of heavy metal – large multi-million dollar OB trucks.

NEP saw that the writing was on the wall for this business model. Margins have been…