Ellab

About Ellab
Founded in 1949, Ellab has become a leading global provider of high-end validation and monitoring solutions. The product portfolio includes mission-critical validation systems used for measuring and documenting critical parameters, solutions for continuous monitoring of critical processes and environments as well as field service and consulting. The offerings are highly integrated with industry leading, user-friendly software applications.

The company employs approximately 750 people worldwide with sales in more than 70 countries, serving a blue-chip customer base covering all the top 40 pharmaceutical companies globally.

Market trends and drivers
The global addressable market for validation- and monitoring solutions and services is a fast-growing market across geographies, driven by underlying global macro trends such as increasing regulation, rising focus on consumer safety, Industry 4.0, services outsourcing penetration and growing demand from pharmaceutical end-markets. The market is non-cyclical given the mission-criticality of validation and monitoring solutions and the associated regulatory requirements, and further has high formal and informal entry barriers, such as relationship-driven sales models and high switching costs.

Investment potential
When acquired by EQT, Ellab had been growing profitably at a double-digit organic growth rate for 15 years. This had been enabled by an entrenched leadership position in the growing niche market for thermal validation and monitoring, supported by strong underlying and non-cyclical macro trends. During the ownership, EQT will support the continued global growth of Ellab through an array of organic and inorganic growth levers. On the organic side, EQT will focus on supporting Ellab to strengthen leadership in the profitable core markets by investing in R&D (with focus on software), digitalization and sales force, continue investments in services offering allowing Ellab to further monetize its existing customer base while expanding market opportunity, growing presence in high-end monitoring market by launching new best-in-class solution and scaling it, further invest in software solutions and further scale sustainability efforts. On the inorganic side, EQT will focus on acquiring and consolidating primarily field service and consulting targets in US and Europe.