With private-equity help, Inmark moves deeper into pharma cold chain packaging

Quad-C Management (Charlottesville, VA), a mid-market private equity firm, has announced an investment in Inmark Packaging, a supplier of rigid containers and life sciences packaging. Inmark has been on a role in the past couple years; last year it acquired Saf-T-Pak, another pharma cold-chain supplier, and a year ago opened an office in Raamsdonksveer, Netherlands, to serve the European market. (Headquartered in Austell, GA, it also has multiple locations in the US, and in Singapore.)

Frank Winslow, partner at Quad-C, says that the investment (amount undisclosed) is structured as a “owner-operator recapitalization,” which means that the current management of Inmark retains significant ownership in the business. He adds that the expectation is that Inmark will make future acquisitions. “We have completed three acquisitions in the past three years, and we felt bringing on a partner like Quad-C, with substantial capital, industry and M&A expertise, would allow us to accelerate growth further,” added David Oyler, Inmark CEO, in a statement.

At least as regards temperature-controlled packaging for pharma, there would seem to be multiple acquisition targets; a significant portion of the vendor base in this field is relatively small and mostly privately-held firms. At the same time, these vendors’ clients—multinational global pharma companies—are looking for providers that can handle packaging needs from multiple continents, and deliver services that are becoming increasingly uniform with Good Distribtion Practices (GDP) standards. Interestingly, Quad-C itself has a perspective on this: the company says that the Inmark investment in “falls squarely within three of Quad-C’s core investing sectors -- packaging, specialty distribution and healthcare.”