Silverfleet Capital

Creating value

We have an active approach to building value within our portfolio, with a focus on growing the sales and earnings of our portfolio companies. ‘Buy and build’ is our key investment strategy, indeed we even coined the phrase ‘buy and build’ which has now become an accepted private equity industry term.

Buy and build is about investing in a core platform company, and then backing that business to make one or more acquisitions. These ‘add-ons’ will ideally bring either new customers, new markets or new technologies into the group.

In executing Buy-and-Build strategies, we are effectively acting as a trade buyer, yet a trade buyer with significant speed and execution advantage. Through a Buy-and-Build strategy, our portfolio companies are able to achieve real revenue and cost synergies, as well as other scale benefits, such as increased purchasing power.

We are highly experienced in pursuing consolidation strategies; our primary research, the Buy & Build Monitor, shows that we consistently undertake more Buy & Build transactions within our portfolio than the industry average; indeed since 2000 we have completed more than 100 add-ons. However it is our expertise in pursuing Buy & Build strategies, and our willingness to back our platform companies that sets us apart.

In addition to Buy & Build, we have extensive experience in ‘Roll-out’ strategies, being the expansion of existing formats or facilities. This is a strategy that we have pursued with some success, notably in the Retail, Leisure and Consumer sector, for example at Oasis, where we opened 148 new stores and concessions under the period of our ownership, and also at Histoire d’Or where we oversaw the opening of 84 stores.