European Dental Partners

European Dental Partners (EDP), based in Lübeck, Germany, is a leading dental consumables distributor, operating in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe.

The trade division, branded M+W Dental, sells dental consumables and small appliances via mail order and through state-of-the-art web-shops. In the German market, M+W Dental has more than 40% market share in the mail order dental business, supplying practices and laboratories. The production division – Interadent - manufactures high quality and low-cost prosthetics, with laboratories in Germany and the Philippines.

Our investment

EDP is a clear demonstration of one of Silverfleet’s principal investment strategies - buy and build. Having acquired the platform company, M+W Dental, in October 2004, we identified the importance of expanding the company’s operations outside of Germany to capture both the growth of the CEE markets and increasing levels of so-called dental tourism. We could largely achieve this using the existing German product ranges and infrastructure.

Value creation

Alongside management, we embarked on an ambitious buy and build programme, completing five add-on acquisitions in the first three years of our investment.

EDP bought three businesses in 2006. The first was Dentamed, the market leader in dental distribution in the Czech Republic. This was followed by the acquisition of Stomatol, Dentamed´s principal competitor in the Czech market. After these two acquisitions, EDP became the market leading dental distributor in the Czech Republic and a platform for EDP to expand further into Central and Eastern Europe. At the end of 2006, EDP diversified its service offering when it acquired InteraDent, one of the largest dental laboratories in Germany.

EDP completed its two other significant acquisitions in 2007 – Prodent International, a Slovenian market leader in dental distribution; and Dentatus, which operates in Croatia. EDP had set up ‘green field’ operations in Switzerland and Austria in 2005, and EDP entered the Hungarian dental distribution market in 2007.

Outcome

In April 2011, we agreed to sell EDP for €170m in a strategic trade sale to Lifco Dental International, the dental products division of Lifco, a privately held Swedish industrial group. The sale generated a return of about 2.3x our investment.