Caledonia Investments’ acquisition of a majority stake in a Wigan-headquartered designer and manufacturer of air, vacuum and jet wash machines has been named as Deal of the Month.
The stake is in the European division of AIR-serv, comprised of Airvending Ltd and AIR-serv Netherlands (together AIR-serv Europe).
Founded in 1984, AIR-serv Europe operates from nine offices, and serves about 2,500 customers with approximately 20,000 machines installed across more than 15,000 customer locations in the UK and Ireland, the Benelux, France, Germany and Spain.
Clive Steel became AIR-serv Europe’s chief executive in 2022 having led the business’ operations in the UK and Ireland since 2012.
AIR-serv Europe has operated as an independent division of US based CSC ServiceWorks since CSC acquired the business, alongside the North-American AIR-serv operations in 2013.
Caledonia has subscribed £142.5m for a 99.8 per cent equity stake in AIR-serv Europe alongside an investment from the management team of £500,000 for the remaining equity.
The balance of the purchase price will be financed from bank debt facilities totalling £60m.
Caledonia’s investment in AIR-serv Europe was led by Chris Hodges, Theo Tizard, James Lander and Joe Carter Hepplewhite.
Taylor Wessing (Ed Waldron, Jonny Bethell and Martin Yells) provided legal advice and Lincoln International (Phil McCreanor and Aude Doyen) provided corporate finance and debt advice to Caledonia. OC&C (Tom Gladstone) provided commercial advice, Deloitte (Tim Haden) provided tax advice and PwC (James Tubby) provided financial due diligence.
William Blair (Jack Blomfield, Manuel Sammut, AJ Reus and Nick Comhair) provided corporate finance advice to the vendors and legal advice was provided by Allen & Overy (Andrew Schoorlemmer and Robert Hatton). Commercial and financial due diligence advice were respectively provided to the vendors by EY Parthenon (Rishi Shah) and EY (Mark Griffiths).
Liberty Corporate Finance (Kevin Palmer) and K&L Gates (James Cross) advised management.