Livonia Partners Brings NYSE Company to Baltics with Archyvu Sistemos Exit
(Vilnius, March 16, 2016) -- The pan-Baltic private equity firm Livonia Partners has brought New York Stock Exchange-listed Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM), the world’s biggest archive services firm, to the three Baltic countries by exiting Archyvų Sistemos, a company in its legacy portfolio.
Iron Mountain acquired the pan-Baltic storage firm along with its 400 customers, which are mainly leading banks, insurers, telecom companies, retail chains and public institutions. Boston-based Iron Mountain, in announcing the news on March 10th, cited growth opportunities in and from the Baltics and the need to serve its global and regional customers who are present in the region.
“This is a landmark exit which shows the real potential for private equity funds in the Baltics to accelerate the growth of local companies and help them attract strong, big- name strategic suitors,” said Mindaugas Utkevičius, a founding partner at Livonia. “We had multiple approaches as the investment matured.”
Archyvų Sistemos provides services for the secure storage of, access to, and management of information assets, including physical and digital records, scanning solutions and destruction of information. It is part of the information management outsourcing trend, which is gaining momentum in emerging markets. The services help organizations reduce storage costs, comply with regulations, recover from disaster and better use their information.
After Archyvų Sistemos was acquired in 2008, new management was immediately brought in to replace the company’s retiring founder. Subsequent expansion to Estonia and Latvia resulted in a doubling of the company’s revenue.
“It was a well-handled generational change, something that is more and more relevant in the Baltics where many entrepreneurs who launched their businesses after regaining independence in the early 1990s are now looking to move along. We saw that also with Ha Serv,” the Estonian sauna maker in which Livonia Partners recently took a majority stake, Utkevičius said.
Ha Serv was the first investment for Livonia’s maiden Livonia Partners Fund I, which held a 70 million-euro first close in August 2015 and continues a strategy of investing in medium- size companies in the Baltics.
For further information please contact:
Mindaugas Utkevičius
Livonia Partners
+370 620 71777
mindaugas.utkevicius@livoniapartners.com
Livonia Partners
Livonia Partners was initiated partly through the Baltic Innovation Fund (BIF) and the European Investment Fund, which seek to strengthen access to capital for Baltic companies in order to encourage economic growth. Founded and run by Mindaugas Utkevičius, Kristine Berzina, Rain Lõhmus, and Kaido Veske, the fund’s investors are domestic and international institutional investors.livoniapartners.com
Archyvu Sistemos
Archyvų Sistemos is the largest outsourced document storage and servicing company in the Baltics, with secure facilities throughout the region and about 20,000 cubic meters of physical records at present. It also offers records destruction, digital archiving, scanning and other ancillary services. Founded in 2001, the company now has 124 employees.http://www.archyvusistemos.lt/en
Photo: Samuel Zeller