Indutrade: Industrial Deal Sourcing

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How have you seen the number of entrants and copycats change over the last few years?

There's been a dramatic increase in the number of entrants. Many people are trying to do exactly the same thing as Indutrade and Lagercrantz. This trend really took off with the IPO of Storskogen, which was initially very successful and created great value in a short time. It was one of the largest IPOs that year. If you look at the top 10 IPOs of the last five years, Storskogen is probably one of them. They achieved this in a fairly short amount of time. The success of Indutrade and competitors at the stock market made many people try to replicate it. Now, there are more than 20 companies trying to do what Indutrade is doing, but they are much smaller, of course.

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How did you source deals?

There were basically two ways. We had a very large and important advisor network, including corporate finance firms and brokers, which passed on deals to Indutrade. Many of these brokers had worked in the industry for 20 to 30 years, so they knew quite well what we were looking for. It wasn't the large corporate finance firms like Goldman Sachs or the big four; it was rather smaller local regional firms. They came up with quite good proposals, to be honest. More than 50% of the decisions we made came from that network. The remaining deals came from our internal network, which included our operating companies. They sometimes knew a competitor, a customer, or a supplier they thought would be a good fit within Indutrade and passed on the tip to our team. The business areas also had M&A on their agenda, so they were looking for targets as well.

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What other sectors were off-limits? You mentioned autos. What else was on the blacklist?

The telecommunications industry was also on the blacklist. This was more of a legacy decision from when the telecommunications network was being built out. It's not as relevant now, but it was one industry we avoided. Later on, we also couldn't invest in industries exposed to oil and gas. Other than that, I'm not aware of any other segments we couldn't invest in. It needed to be business-to-business and in the industrial segment. It also needed to be linked to the sale of a physical product or component, so we didn't acquire service companies.

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