Good morning Eurohubsters, Nina Lindholm here with the last Dealflow of the week.
This week, one theme really stood out to me, and that was add-on acquisitions. Portfolio management and bolt-ons are likely to be a focus for many firms this year as larger deals may struggle to get over the line due to the challenging market conditions, according to many of our sources. Some examples of that this week were Keensight-backed Symeres adding on a contract research organisation, Ontario Teachers’-backed GPA Global bolting on a luxury packaging provider and Bregal Milestone’s CUBE buying a regulatory technology firm.
Biological. First up, Keensight Capital’s portfolio company Symeres acquired Oncolines, a contract research organisation (CRO) that provides early biology services and cell-line profiling assays. Oncolines is Symeres’ third acquisition in the past 10 months and will take group revenues to over €100 million.
Based in Oss in the Netherlands, Oncolines is a CRO that offers precision medicine services in the fields of oncology and immunotherapy. The company’s clients are clinical and pre-clinical biopharma customers that seek to differentiate their drug candidates.
“We are convinced of the strategic, geographic, and cultural fit of the combination, and the complementarity of Oncolines’ capabilities in oncology-focused in-vitro pharmacology,” said Amit Karna, partner at Keensight Capital.
Read our full coverage on the deal here.
Before the holidays in December, I spoke with Thomas De Waen, managing director and co-founder at Core Equity Holdings. The focus on add-ons made me think of that interview, as Core Equity’s portfolio aims to have less than five businesses.
The firm intends to deploy more equity capital once it owns a business, as opposed to at the time of the transaction. “It’s a more efficient use of capital,” he told me. “We deploy resources where the chance of winning is much higher.”
As most of Core Equity’s dealmaking is within the portfolio, De Waen expects it to be slightly shielded from wider market dynamics.
You can read my full interview with De Waen here.
Luxurious. Moving on with this week’s add-on deals, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board portfolio company GPA Global acquired Cosfibel Group, a provider of luxury promotional packaging, luxury gifting and merchandising products.
Based in Levallois-Perret in France, Cosfibel designs, develops and manufactures gifts and packaging for the beauty, fine food, and wine and spirits markets. Cosfibel Group owns four companies: Cosfibel Premium, Grumbe, Shopluxe and Boitealu.
“The combination with GPA will further develop Cosfibel’s well-established European customer network as part of GPA’s strong global platform,” said Raju Ruparelia, senior managing director, private capital, Asia-Pacific at Ontario Teachers’.
To find out more about the deal, check out our full coverage here.
I wrote a listicle on luxury deals, as Ontario Teachers’ isn’t the only firm focusing on the segment. You can read that piece here.
Regulatory. Let’s look at one more add-on. Bregal Milestone-backed CUBE acquired The Hub, a regulatory technology firm, to further expand its automated regulatory intelligence (ARI) technology.
The Hub, headquartered in London, provides AI-backed web data capture and monitoring products to support compliance and regulatory requirements.
CUBE will consolidate The Hub technology with its RegPlatform, allowing customers to automate their regulatory compliance processes, which will reduce risk and cost of compliance operations.
The bolt-on acquisition comes on the back of Bregal Milestone’s investment in CUBE to support the company’s geographical expansion and extend its technology platform.
To find out how CUBE will consolidate The Hub’s technology, read our full coverage here.
That’s all from me. I hope you all have a great weekend. Craig McGlashan will write to you on Monday.
Cheers,
Nina
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