Leading European facilities management provider Apleona is being sold by Swedish private equity fund EQT VII to French private equity group PAI Partners for a reported €1.6 billion. The deal is subject to the usual conditions and approvals and is expected to close early in Q2 of 2021.
The transaction will also see shares valued at around €450-470 million being shared with former owner Bilfinger, the Mannheim-headquartered industrial services group, due to a clause made in the 2016 deal, when Apleona was sold to EQT by Bilfinger for €1.4 billion.
We reported in last month’s REFIRE that EQT was also working in parallel on a potential stock market listing for Apleona for summer 2021, organized by Deutsche Bank and UBS. That route has now obviously been rejected in favour of the sale to PAI Partners.
EQT said that under its ownership, Apleona has been transformed into a pure-play facility management provider with an unrivalled position in DACH, partly through the divestments of its cyclical, low margin construction segment in 2017 and its UK real estate advisory business GVA in 2018. This strategic shift was further accelerated by significant investments into a digitalised operating platform, fully focused on providing high-value integrated facility management services to its core blue-chip customer base. Apleona’s focus has led to a steady above-market growth rate and numerous new key account wins since 2016, it said.
Apleona now has more than 20,000 employees, managing tens of thousands of buildings and offices in over 30 countries across Europe. It supports its clients with a wide range of environmental services, particularly in reducing buildings’ energy consumption and CO2 emissions. A lot of these services are heavily digitalized, and it has added bolt-ons and acquisitions to broaden its services, such as buying Recogizer earlier this year, a company offering an AI-powered steering solution for a buildings’ heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Jochen Keysberg, CEO of the Neu-Isenburg headquarterd Apleona, commented: "We have very much enjoyed the collaborative journey under EQT ownership and are thrilled to see how Apleona has benefited from EQT's expertise and the investments made since the carve-out… We have an advantage with digital products and the automation and digitalization of operational processes and an unrivalled track record of sustainability initiatives supporting our client's efforts."
