How to write an acquisition press release

An acquisition press release names the buyer, the target and — the part most releases blur — whether the deal has signed or actually closed, because those are different dates. It then answers what happens to the target's brand, its contracts and its people, states the price or says terms were not disclosed, and lists any conditions still outstanding. Everything else is optional; those are not.

Two dates matter in an acquisition and most releases only acknowledge one. Signing is when the parties agree. Closing is when the transaction actually happens, which can be the same afternoon or eight months later, and which is not always in the parties' gift. A release that blurs the two is the most common defect in this category and the one that causes real problems, because employees, customers and suppliers act on what they read.

This article is not legal advice. It describes what is in published rules and rate cards. Deal disclosure belongs with the lawyers who wrote the agreement.

Why the delay exists, in numbers you can check

Above a certain size, US deals must be notified to the antitrust agencies and the parties must then wait before completing — the premerger notification and waiting period that section 7A of the Clayton Act sets out. The Federal Trade Commission revises the figures annually, and the 2026 notice in the Federal Register sets out both the thresholds and the mechanism. The Act:

requires all persons contemplating certain mergers or acquisitions, which meet or exceed the jurisdictional thresholds in the Act, to file notification with the Commission and the Assistant Attorney General and to wait a designated period of time before consummating such transactions

The 2026 adjusted size-of-transaction threshold under section 7A(a)(2)(A) is $535.5 million, with the lower size-of-person tier at $133.9 million; the thresholds took effect 30 days after the 16 January 2026 publication. The filing fee schedule in the same notice starts at $35,000 for transactions below $189.6 million and rises to $2,460,000 at $5.869 billion or more.

Most deals announced by press release are far below those numbers and never file. That is exactly why the distinction matters: if your deal is small enough to close on signing, say so and stop writing conditional sentences; if it is not, the conditions are the news and hiding them makes the release inaccurate the moment a customer asks when it takes effect. Other jurisdictions run their own regimes with their own thresholds, which is another question for counsel rather than for a distributor.

What actually counts as news

The event is the agreement. What makes it readable is the answer to four questions a stranger will ask:

• What is being bought — a company, a product line, a book of customers, a team.
• What happens to it — absorbed and retired, run as a subsidiary, kept as a brand.
• What changes for existing customers, and when — contracts, support, pricing, product roadmaps.
• What happens to the people — retained, transferring, or not addressed, which reads as not retained.

"Terms were not disclosed" is a perfectly respectable sentence and far better than a number you will have to walk back. What is not respectable is silence on the customer and employee questions, because the release is the document those two audiences will read first and it is the only one written by you rather than by a rumour.

The structure that clears editorial

Deal releases run long — conditions, two boilerplates, an advisers paragraph — and length is the billing unit. PR Newswire's 2024 domestic card charges $1,020 for 400 words on US1 National and $325 for each additional hundred, so a 700-word deal release is roughly $1,995 before any multimedia. Our own tiers take 250 to 1,200 words and meter nothing, so a 700-word deal release costs exactly what a 400-word one does — which for this category means the advisers list survives or goes on editorial merit rather than on price. What the tiers cost across eleven wires is worth having open when you decide how much of the advisers list survives.

A headline and lede you could file

Halden Freight agrees to acquire Corradine Cold Storage for £14.2m, subject to closing conditions

>

MANCHESTER, United Kingdom, 3 November 2026 — Halden Freight has agreed to acquire Corradine Cold Storage, a four-site chilled warehousing operator in northern England, for £14.2 million in cash. The transaction is expected to close in January 2027 subject to customary closing conditions. Corradine will continue to trade under its own name and all 96 employees will transfer to Halden on completion.

"Agrees to acquire", an expected close, a stated condition, a decision on the brand and a headcount. A reader who is a Corradine customer or a Corradine employee has their answer in the first paragraph, which is the entire job.

What happens to the target's published history

Something specific to this category: the acquired company's own press releases do not go anywhere. They sit on wire archives and financial terminals under the old name, dated, indexed and unamendable. We opened a February 2026 release still live and unchanged six months later. Publishers do occasionally purge — Digital Journal returned 410 Gone across five reseller-wire sections when we checked — but that is their decision and their timetable, not yours.

So if the target's brand is being retired, the acquisition release becomes the bridge between the two names, and it is the document that makes the old name's trail legible. That is a job worth doing deliberately: name both entities in full, once, in a sentence a search engine and an assistant can parse. Announcing a rebrand has the same problem in a harder form.

If you want a demonstration of how untidy the record gets, the ownership history of the wires themselves is instructive — GlobeNewswire changed hands twice in roughly a year, and its own footer now names a company most of its customers have never heard of.

What the announcement can and cannot do

It can be the authoritative, dated, citable account of the transaction, ahead of the rumour and ahead of the competitor briefing against you. It can settle the customer and employee questions in writing. It can give trade press the facts they need to write accurately about a deal they will write about anyway.

It cannot make a deal look larger than the disclosed terms suggest, and a release that avoids the number while implying a big one is read exactly that way. It cannot manage an internal announcement — staff should hear it from a person, before the wire. And a distribution receipt is not evidence of coverage: what a distributor actually confirms when it says a release went out is worth understanding before anyone reports on the announcement's reach. A sample report shows what the second one lists.

The check before you send

• The headline distinguishes "agrees to acquire" from "acquires", and the copy matches.
• Conditions and expected close stated, or an explicit statement that the deal has completed.
• A decision on the target's brand, contracts and staff, written down.
• Price disclosed, or "terms were not disclosed" — never an implication.
• Both boilerplates supplied verbatim by their owners, both contacts named.
• Employees told before the wire, not by it.