Scaling Up Made All The Difference
The saying ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’ certainly holds true for Eamon Waters (61), founder of waste collection business Beauparc Utilities, which was acquired by private-equity giant Macquarie Asset Management in June 2021. Waters owned a 62.4% stake in the venture after bringing Blackstone, another PE giant, on board in March 2019.
Beauparc is best known for its refuse collection brands, Panda and Greenstar. Nationally, the company’s share of the bin collection market is estimated at 20%, with a reported profit margin of 35% on this activity. Beauparc is also active in the UK and the Netherlands, and in recent years it has branched into power supply, leveraging off its huge customer base.
Turnover for Beauparc Utilities in 2020 was €530m, with 74% of revenue coming from waste management, 17% from the utility arm, and 9% from the sale of recycled goods. The geographic spread was 66% of turnover in Ireland, 31% in the UK, and 3% in the Netherlands.
Beauparc’s operating profit in 2020 was €50m, and net cash inflow from operations was €95m. That would underpin a reported €1.3bn valuation of the business when Macquarie swooped. Beauparc had total liabilities of €440m at the end of 2020 and net worth of €38m, so guesstimates of Waters’ gross profit from the deal ranges from €400m to €500m.
This extraordinary wealth creation happened in a short space of time. Eamon Waters and his brother Noel started out in refuse collection and waste processing in the 1980s with a couple of trucks from their petrol station in Beauparc, near Slane, in Co. Meath. Turnover in 2016 was €70m, and acquiring Greenstar that year added annual sales of €130m. There were other buys, too, such as Bioverda, which extracts methane from landfill sites, and waste management and recycling operations in the UK.
Turnover of €286m in 2017 improved to €363m in 2018 and €508m in 2019. It was this scaling-up that caught the eye of Macquarie, which is only interested in big buys. Macquarie is funded by institutions seeking some sort of return in an era when bond yields are tiny, and it’s prepared to pay a premium for large businesses with reliable cash flows. A couple of weeks after the Beauparc purchase, the Australians participated in a consortium buying up Italy’s toll roads.
In retrospect, Waters’ key move was acquiring Greenstar, which doubled the company’s heft in one move.
Beauparc’s refuse peers in Ireland are sizeable too, with annual turnover of €86m at Thornton’s, €44m at Greyhound Household, and €33m at Oxigen. The five-year spurt that saw Beauparc breaking from this pack made all the difference when the exit deal arrived.