Our thesis

A working building needs air, water and electricity every day, and it needs someone to look after them. The work repeats: maintenance contracts and service agreements, inspections and checks the law requires on a fixed date, breakdowns that will not wait for the customer’s next investment decision. When budgets tighten, new construction is postponed, but the maintenance of a hospital’s heating plant is not, and neither is the inspection of a factory’s electrical switchboard. It is also a small expense for whoever pays it, set against what it protects, which is why the customer relationship is stable and not very price sensitive. We look for companies that already have a maintenance book and room to grow it.

The sector is made up of many small companies, almost all of them run by their owner. There is no brand a building owner would recognise from Braga to Faro, and the companies with the scale to serve demanding customers well are almost always isolated cases in their own region.

A company of thirty people solves almost everything on its own, except what only gets solved with scale: purchasing, insurance, financing, systems, and training and keeping technicians in a market where technicians are what everyone is short of. In a group, these things come to exist, and they carry on existing after the owner stops doing them. What the group does not replace is what makes the company good: the customers and the team remain its own, and what is shared comes in gradually, only where it helps. In Sweden, groups such as Bravida and Instalco have done this in these same trades, buying many dozens of family companies over the years.

We start with heating, ventilation and air conditioning, where recurring maintenance and technical demands are clearest. Electrical, the largest of the building trades, and plumbing follow. We go in one trade at a time, and other building trades will only join when it makes sense.

Demand does not depend on the cycle alone. Half of Portugal’s residential buildings were built before 1981, and refurbishing an old building almost always means redoing its air conditioning, its electrics and its water systems. Electrification runs through these trades: around 49,000 heat pumps were sold in Portugal in 2024, and charging and solar keep growing. The law adds recurrence, with inspections and maintenance on fixed dates.

Portugal has around a million and a half companies, and almost all of them are small and family owned. The generation that founded them is now reaching the age at which the question can no longer be put off. In Portugal, buyers are scarce. An owner with succession unsettled, a partner leaving, children with another life or everything in one company finds three roads today: close, sell to the competitor next door, or sell to someone who is already thinking about reselling. Demography decides the number of times this conversation will take place in Portugal over the coming decade.

At this size there are almost no buyers. Private equity invests in Portugal, relative to the size of the economy, a fraction of the European average, and a fund, however willing, has to write bigger cheques than these companies justify and has to tell the owner when it will be selling again. The foreign groups that came into Portugal bought the largest companies in the sector. We look below that size. The competitor in the next town sometimes buys his neighbour, but he rarely has the capital for it and almost never intends to keep it as a company. What is left is the owner of a good company taking calls from intermediaries and never receiving a serious offer from anyone who will stay.

What each trade is, and where it is going, is in Our trades.

INE, Censos 2021 and Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2023 · EHPA, Market Report 2025. According to the Livro Branco da Sucessão Empresarial, published by Fundação AEP in 2011, around half of Portuguese family companies do not survive the first transfer between generations, and only around a fifth reach the third.

We are not raising capital through this website, and you will not find projections here. The documentation is not public.