At the end of every winter, Stockholm attracts a specific kind of investor. Not for a tech summit or a macro conference, but for two days of presentations, panel discussions, and one-on-one meetings about a business model that many in the financial world barely knew of a decade ago: the serial acquirer.

This March, around 250 holdco builders, independent sponsors, PE professionals and serial acquirers from 20 countries met and watched 30 companies present on stage. What started in 2021 as a niche gathering for Scandinavian small-cap investors has become the de facto central meeting point of the serial acquirer world.

That it happens in Stockholm is not accidental.

Swedish cultural ties with serial acquisitions

Sweden has roughly 10.5 million people, fewer than Ohio. It also has more than 700 companies listed on Nasdaq Stockholm, or around 74 listed companies per million inhabitants, one of the highest densities of listed businesses anywhere in the world. By one measure, roughly 80% of the country’s best-performing large-cap stocks are serial acquirers. The combined market cap of the 30-odd listed Swedish serial acquirers stands at around $60 billion.

The intellectual lineage runs to a single company: Bergman & Beving, founded in 1906, which began making systematic acquisitions in the 1960s and eventually split into two independent listed groups in September 2001. One was Lagercrantz, which has returned approximately 120 times its value since the split. The other was Addtech, which has returned around 210 times. Both remain listed in Stockholm. Both present at the Redeye Serial Acquirer conference each year.

In a different perspective, Longriver Investments noted that the Nordic concentration of serial acquirer talent raises a genuine dilemma for investors: with so many high-quality platforms clustered in one market, the harder problem is narrowing a shortlist, not building one.

The durability of those returns is best illustrated by a story from a recent annual shareholder meeting: an investor who put money into one of the Swedish serial acquirers 50 years ago has generated a 7,500 times return. That equates to a 20% compound annual growth rate since 1976. She still holds the shares.

The model that produced that outcome rests on a few non-negotiable principles. The book Compounders, written by three Swedes, summarises the financial framework as a 15% IRR hurdle on acquisitions, an EBITA-to-working-capital ratio above 45%, and a target of 15% annual EPS growth. Those numbers appear across the investor materials of company after company in this space. They are not aspirational targets. They are the minimum conditions for doing another deal.

symbol

More practice than theory

The format is deliberately practitioner-facing. Each day runs a sequence of company presentations followed by Q&A, with panel discussions on cross-cutting themes and a structured programme of group meetings between investors and operators running in parallel.

The presenting companies span the full range of the serial acquirer universe. Established names like Addtech, Lagercrantz, Vitec Software, and Bergman & Beving share the stage with earlier-stage platforms. The mix is deliberate. Operators at different stages of the same journey tend to learn more from each other than from most outside advisers.

For a company in an early stage of building its investor base, an industry gathering can compress what would otherwise be months of roadshow activity into two days of face-to-face conversations with qualified investors who already understand the model.

The investor perspective

One investor panel brought together Andrew Hollingworth of Holland Advisors, Christian Solberg of Sun Mountain Partners, and David Marcus of Evermore Global Advisors. Their central observation was straightforward: long-term success in serial acquisition tends to come from consistency, not brilliance.

The data behind that point is instructive. Over the long run, companies that completed one or two acquisitions per year in their early years tended to outperform those that pursued four to six deals annually from the start. The slower pace allowed operators to find what the panellists described as product-market fit in their acquisition approach: a repeatable, tested thesis that could support faster scaling from a solid foundation, rather than one that unravels under pressure.

The reason investors are drawn to the model in the first place, the investors argued, is that serial acquirers solve a problem most businesses never crack: the reinvestment problem. In most companies, good opportunities to redeploy capital are limited. You fund the core projects, expand capacity, invest in the product, and after that the incremental dollar earns a lower return. Cash piles up. Owners either return it to shareholders or stretch into lower-quality projects to put the money to work. Serial acquirers with disciplined acquisition criteria and a reliable deal pipeline can reinvest close to 100% of free cash flow at high rates of return, in the best cases for decades at a time.

A model that draws attention

What makes the serial acquirer model compelling enough to pull investors from 24 countries to Stockholm is the consistency of its returns over long periods. Judges Scientific, the UK-based acquirer of scientific instrument makers, has returned roughly 100 times its value since 2006. Lagercrantz has delivered more than 30% annual total shareholder return since 2009. These are not outliers. They are reasonably representative of what disciplined execution produces over a full cycle.

As the Serial Acquirers Club, an investor roundtable, has observed: the best acquirers share a common foundation of disciplined capital allocation, large insider ownership, and published performance metrics – a combination that is straightforward to describe and genuinely difficult to sustain across economic cycles and management transitions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
The structural reasons are well documented. Several characteristics distinguish the best serial acquirers:

  1. Decentralised operations combined with scale benefits: subsidiaries retain operational autonomy while accessing the parent’s capital, sourcing relationships, and institutional knowledge.
  2. Internal benchmarking that drives organic improvement across the portfolio, not just through acquisitions.
  3. Stable leadership at the subsidiary level, with founders often remaining post-acquisition and in-house management academies preparing the next generation of operators.
  4. Many small acquisitions at fair multiples, avoiding transformative deals that carry execution risk and tend to destroy value.
  5. Strong alignment of incentives, with management retaining stakes or earning equity in the parent company.

The opportunity set remains large. Roughly 15,000 small private European companies are estimated to come to market each year. Despite the growth of the category and the arrival of new entrants, the best serial acquirers continue to source most deals through proprietary relationships. Culture and reputation, built over years of consistent behaviour with sellers, remain genuine competitive advantages that newer platforms cannot easily replicate.

The growth model going global

The most significant development is geographic. The serial acquirer model, long associated almost exclusively with Sweden and the broader Nordics, is being built with increasing conviction outside its home market, and practitioners are now making the trip to Stockholm specifically to study the source.

Evergreen, the San Francisco-based acquirer of technology services businesses backed by Alpine Investors, is one of the clearest American examples. Founded in 2017, the firm has completed more than 160 acquisitions and grown to roughly $1.5 billion in revenue while maintaining double-digit organic growth. The model is explicitly decentralised: portfolio companies retain their brands and management teams, with the holding company providing capital and a shared operating framework rather than central control. The shared DNA with the Swedish playbook is visible – permanent ownership, proprietary deal sourcing, organic growth layered on top of acquisitions. Where it diverges is pace: Evergreen has moved faster than many of its Swedish counterparts and reinvests all free cash flow into growth rather than distributions.

The UK has its own cluster. Judges Scientific, Diploma, and Halma have each built recognisably Swedish-style models in British markets, focused on niche industrial and scientific businesses with high recurring revenue and low customer concentration. Judges Scientific alone has returned roughly 100 times its value since 2006.

Further away, NGTG – a Japanese acquirer of manufacturing businesses founded in 2018 – presents a playbook that maps almost directly onto the Swedish framework: screen hundreds of targets annually, acquire at modest multiples, use low-cost domestic bank debt, and leave management in place. The model transfers because the underlying logic works in any country with a sufficient supply of small private businesses and willing sellers. What Sweden has that others are still building is 60 years of documented institutional knowledge and a research ecosystem built around it.

3 playbook takeaways for buy-and-build operators

  1. Companies that have tried to do four to six acquisitions per year from the start tended to underperform those that did one or two and got the model right first. Speed of deal execution is not the constraint that separates good serial acquirers from great ones. Repeatability is. Build a thesis that works on ten deals before scaling to fifty.
  2. The 15% IRR hurdle, EBITA-to-working-capital above 45%, and 15% annual EPS growth target that appear consistently across the best Swedish serial acquirers are not arbitrary benchmarks. They reflect the minimum return profile needed to justify deploying capital into acquisitions rather than returning it to shareholders. If your deals are not clearing these thresholds on a portfolio basis, the acquisition machine is not yet earning its keep.
  3. Evergreen’s 160 acquisitions in nine years, with 10% organic growth sustained alongside, demonstrates that the Swedish model travels across sectors and geographies when the intellectual framework is applied with discipline. The advantage Sweden has is 60 years of documented institutional knowledge. That gap is closable, but only by operators who treat the model as a system to be built carefully, not a template to be deployed quickly.

Sources

  1. Redeye. ‘Serial Acquirers Conference 2026.’ redeye.se. 6th edition, March 12-13 2026, Stockholm, ~30 companies participating.
  2. Redeye. ‘Serial Acquirers Conference 2025.’ redeye.se. 250 visitors from 24 countries, 150+ one-on-one meetings, 33 companies.
  3. Redeye Serial Acquirer Team presentation deck (2026). Investment framework: 15% IRR hurdle, EBITA/WC > 45%, 15% EPS growth target, 15,000 European companies for sale annually.
  4. Markus, Mike (PrivateEquityGuy). ‘Serial Acquirers, Stockholm & NYC.’ privatequityguy.beehiiv.com. March 16, 2026.
  5. RollUpEurope. ‘Redeye 2025 Serial Acquirers Conference, Day 1 and Day 2 notes.’
  6. Serial Acquirers Club (Substack). ‘Musings from Redeye’s Serial Acquirer Event.’ sacresearch.substack.com.
  7. Longriver Investments. ‘Stockholm 2024.’ longriverinv.com.
  8. Alpine Investors. ‘2025 Year-in-Review.’ alpineinvestors.com. Evergreen closed 47 transactions in 2025 including 100th MSP acquisition; operations across US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia.