Good morning Eurohubsters, Craig McGlashan here with the Dealflow.
The newsletter is bursting at the seams with content today. First up, Ambienta is the latest private equity firm to contribute to our Q&A series on the outlook for 2023, then we look at Triton making a rival bid to Bain Capital’s move to take a Finnish company private. On top of that, we have a series of deals to report from sectors as varied as the lift industry, claims management, luxury packaging and more.
Sustainable Europe. In the latest of our Q&A series with leading private equity dealmakers, I spoke to Mauro Roversi, partner and chief investment officer at Ambienta.
As Ambienta has a sustainability focus in all its investments, we focused on that subject.
“Europe has always been poor in raw materials and the cost of energy has always been high,” he told me. “It’s typical to find companies that historically have delivered products which are more efficient compared to the US, for example.
“That became our hunting space because you have thousands of mid-sized, family-owned businesses that provide solutions that are much more efficient compared to the rest of the world. Europe is the cradle of innovative technology to reduce consumption and boost resource efficiency and pollution control.”
Check out the full interview to learn about why Roversi is positive about dealmaking in 2023 and about his deal highlights of 2022.
Rival offer. Readers will remember that back in early November, we wrote about a Bain Capital-led consortium making a voluntary public cash tender offer for Caverion, a Finnish company headquartered in Vantaa that designs, implements and maintains buildings.
Well, Bain has competition because Triton is making a rival bid via its Fund V. Triton is offering €8 per share, valuing Caverion at around €1.092 billion. That offers a 14.3 percent premium to Bain’s offer of €7 a share.
Triton’s offer has a premium of 70.6 percent to the closing price of Caverion’s share price of €4.69 on Nasdaq Helsinki on 2 November, the last trading day before the Bain offer.
“Having closely followed Caverion since its listing in 2013, we approach Caverion as a former significant shareholder of the company and with great respect for its Nordic roots, strong expertise in the technical building installation and services sector and ambition to grow sustainably,” said Mikael Aro, operating partner at Triton, in a statement accompanying the offer.
“We admire the recent transformation that has been delivered by the company’s management and employees as evidenced in the year-by-year improvement in profitability and its ever-enhancing solutions of supporting customers throughout the building lifecycle and helping them with their smart and green transition.”
The initial offer period commences on 31 January and expires on 11 April.
CED-ing control. I mentioned in yesterday’s Dealflow that Irien Joseph had joined PE Hub Europe as assistant reporter. Irien has come racing out the blocks with a couple of briefs for your reading pleasure.
First up, BlackFin Capital has announced the sale of CED Group to Rivean Capital. The sale is likely to close in the first quarter of 2023.
CED Group, a Rotterdam-headquartered company, provides claims management services, ranging from risk taxation and inspection to emergency assistance, along with claim loss adjustment and handling, repair in kind and recourse.
Check out Irien’s full coverage of the deal to learn about Rivean’s plans for CED and how BlackFin grew the company during its time in charge.
Lifting up. Irien’s second brief is about HIG Capital buying Classic Lifts, a UK lift engineering and maintenance services provider.
Classic has seven offices across the UK, with its registered office in Rotherham. Its management team will reinvest alongside HIG. The financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.
HIG plans to grow the company further organically and via M&A.
Read Irien’s full brief to find out how HIG plans to integrate Classic Lifts with another acquisition it made last year.
You can reach Irien on irien.j@pei.group
Package deal. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board portfolio company GPA Global has 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.
Read more about GPA Global here.
We’ve heard a lot about how the luxury goods sector is an attractive bet for private equity companies as it tends to be resilient to recession. For more on that, check out our coverage from last year of BC Partners and Bain Capital taking joint control of Italian luxury packaging company Fedrigoni – from the BC Partners side and from the Bain Capital side.
Printwear. Sticking in the retail area, Blue Point Capital Partners portfolio company Next Level Apparel has acquired Stedman, a designer, manufacturer and supplier of casual and sportswear blank apparel for the printwear industry.
Headquartered in Aachen, Germany, Stedman is an independent company providing promotional clothing. The company has warehouses in Ghent, Belgium, and Zagreb, Croatia, and a market presence in over 40 countries.
Pharma. We’ve written quite a bit about pharma this week and we have a little more to report on that front today.
Keensight Capital’s portfolio company Symeres has 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.
Full coverage of that deal is here.
Exit. And finally, Deutsche Beteiligungs, via its DBAG Fund VII, has sold its investment in Pmflex, a European manufacturer of electrical installation conduits, to Hager Group.
Pmflex, formerly PM Plastic Materials, produces around 320,000 kilometres of electrical installation tubes annually in its two plants near its headquarters in Bergamo, Italy.
Read more on DBAG’s ownership of Pmflex here.
That’s all folks – I’ll be back with you tomorrow.
Cheers,
Craig
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