Rutland Partners, a UK private equity partnership, has exchanged contracts to acquire the CeDo group of companies from Germany’s Delton for an undisclosed sum.
Rutland Partners, a UK private equity partnership, has exchanged contracts to acquire the CeDo group of companies from Germany’s Delton for an undisclosed sum.
The transaction is conditional on merger control clearances and is expected to complete within three months.
CeDo is a manufacturers of household disposables, manufacturing both own-label and proprietary products such as refuse sacks, bin liners and other speciality kitchen and household disposable products including nappy sacks, cling film and aluminium foil. It holds strong supply relationships with the majority of Europe’s largest supermarkets and discounters.
The business has a strong focus on the UK, German, and French markets whilst sales in Eastern Europe have also grown rapidly in recent years.
The business produces and sells product mainly under own-label arrangements and also operates the Paclan and Poly-Lina brands.
Rutland will implement a wide-ranging plan of operational improvements across the business. These will include a concerted drive to further optimise manufacturing efficiency in all plants, to reduce costs and focus closely on managing working capital.
CeDo will continue to drive the environmentally friendly practice of including increasingly large proportions of post-consumer recycled plastic in its plastic products at its three manufacturing plants in the UK, Poland and China.
Rutland will invest from its GBP322m fund, Rutland Fund II, to support the acquisition with the balance of the funding coming from debt facilities provided by Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance and Indigo Capital.
CeDo will be Rutland’s third investment from Rutland Fund II.
Ben Slatter of Rutland says: ‘We believe that with Rutland’s support CeDo can implement its strategic plan and build considerably on its already strong market position. We are confident that together with CeDo’s management team we will be able to deliver significant operational improvements to the business.’
