We’ve always been a mission-driven business, delivering vital medicines and drugs that demand temperature-controlled containers to keep them safe. We started in Stockholm in 1985 serving local markets, but ours is a service with a global need. With Cinven’s investment, expertise, support and guidance, we were able to grow to fulfil that need and help millions more people.

Peter Gisel-Ekdahl, former CEO, Envirotainer

On a mission

Cinven funds acquired a controlling interest in Envirotainer in September 2018, having tracked the company since 2012. The company’s biggest attractions included its market-leading position, extensive service network, best-in-class reliability, strong customer relationships and regulatory expertise – essential in the highly regulated healthcare industry. Cinven also knew the sector well and could see the trend towards biological pharmaceuticals, and that the growing need for temperature-controlled environments would underpin – and accelerate – Envirotainer’s growth.

Throughout Cinven’s investment, Cinven drew on its local regional and sector expertise, as well as its  experience of developing companies, to help Envirotainer’s executive team develop a growth strategy that took account of operations, research and development (R&D) and products. Cinven also supported Envirotainer’s investments in internal processes and the organisation generally, to ensure the company was fit for the fast-paced growth.

Today, six years on, Cinven still owns a 10% stake in the business, having largely realised its investment in 2022.

“The enterprise value of the business more than doubled to over €2.8 billion during Cinven’s ownership so it was time to look at realising the investment in 2022. We don’t often retain stakes when we agree a successful realisation, preferring to return capital to our investors, nevertheless, we saw the prospect of significant further value creation and wanted to continue the journey as a minority shareholder with a seat on the board,” says Tom Thomasson, Principal at Cinven.

Preparing for growth

At the time of the acquisition in 2018, Envirotainer had grown fast and was clearly a successful company, but Cinven saw scope for further value creation. Cinven worked with the board to ensure customers got the attention and service level they needed. This included creating a new role in the executive team that specifically focused on service delivery and operations. “The role could ensure customers were served better, more efficiently, at less cost for the business. That really had important growth and profitability implications,” says Thomasson.

Cinven supported Envirotainer’s investment in its service infrastructure, including a new hub in Asia Pacific, a region set for strong growth but underserved, and new service stations in India, China and Korea. At the same time, the company developed new digital tools such as a customer platform that takes bookings and tracks shipments in real time for Envirotainer’s next-generation shipping containers – making operations more efficient.

Strategic focus

When the Cinven funds invest in a company, it’s not just about providing funds to invest for growth. Cinven, also brings expertise to help  boards develop the right medium to long-term strategy. For Envirotainer, this included increasing research and development investment in new products, ensuring that what was measured and incentivised helped pull the right growth levers, and making sure its environmental, social and governance (ESG) approach was best-in-class.

Optimisation

Rapid growth had led to high utilisation of Envirotainer’s container fleet in 2018. This made it harder to guarantee availability on specific dates at specific locations, potentially causing problems for customers. Cinven recognised that Envirotainer needed more, high-quality, redesigned containers.

Designing and certifying new containers takes a long time given the regulations in the industry, so Cinven started by ensuring the fleet the business had was employed optimally for customers and for profitability.

Together with management, Cinven focused on three operational key performance indicators: (i) reliability, which is all about temperature control; (ii) availability, which was about having the right container in the right place at the right time; and (iii) volume growth, ensuring the salesforce pushed shipments with good profitability. This focussed the company on driving decisions, such as the move to predictive container maintenance, which fed into these KPIs.

At the same time, the company tripled R&D spend and developed Releye, its next-generation container system. The Releye system has real-time monitoring and can go 170 hours without recharging, longer than any other comparable system on the market.

Another important strategic decision concerned data – how best to use it to drive growth. By looking at the flow of medicines, how it’s changing, where they are being produced and used, the business could foresee customers’ needs and adapt the product and services accordingly – to the benefit of everyone.

Crucially, Cinven also turned its attention to Envirotainer’s ESG agenda. As part of the airfreight ecosystem, the company needed a crystal-clear view of its carbon impact and an effective plan to minimise it. Working with Cinven’s head of ESG, Allegra Day, Envirotainer developed a sustainability framework, mapped its carbon footprint and reached CO2neutrality before Cinven’s realisation. Cinven also worked with the business to increase female representation on the board from zero to 40% at exit in 2022.

Mission accomplished

Under Cinven’s ownership, sales rose from SEK1.3 billion in 2017 to SEK1.9 billion in 2021, the year before Cinven’s realisation. In 2023, the business hit SEK2.6 billion.

The fleet increased from some 5,500 containers to nearly 8,000 today. The company won new customers and increased volumes thanks to better service and improved reliability, with >99% of orders completed on time and in full.

The crucial role Envirotainer played in distributing Covid-19 vaccines to help contain the pandemic, and the career progression opportunities that growth has opened up, fed quickly into high work satisfaction among Envirotainer’s staff. In 2021, the company’s workplace satisfaction score was 84%, compared with Sweden’s industry average of 62%. This, in turn, helped with recruitment and talent retention, which supports further growth, helping Envirotainer fulfil its mission – providing global access to biopharmaceuticals.