Ep 17. Lifco: Swedish Serial Acquirer, 275 Companies, 129%

LifeCo is a Swedish serial acquirer listed on Nasdaq Stockholm since November 2014, and the majority is owned by the industrialist Carl Bennett.

It owns 275 small companies.

The average one has about 30 employees.

They make or sell things most of us never think about, such as dental instruments, consumables, remote-controlled demolition robots, crane and excavator attachments, along with plastic recycling machines, van conversions, and elevator drive systems.

And over the 12 months to June 2026, that collection produced about 29.3 billion kroner of sales and 6.6 billion kroner of EBITDA.

Now, if you've heard episode on the Rails Brothers and Danahar, you know one way to build a compounder.

buy good businesses and install a common operating method, whether it's Kaizen, policy deployment, the Danaher business system.

And if you've heard the episode on Mark Leonard, you know another.

Buy small, decentralize, obsess over return on capital, and never pay with your own shares.

LIFCO sits between those two models.

In a few places, it matches them at their own game.

And in a few places, it disagrees with both in ways that matter more to anyone running a portfolio.

And that's what this episode's about.

So here's the route where LIFCO came from and the patient owner behind it, the number 129%, and what it tells you about the businesses they chose.

The machine, how they buy, the chair, how they run, and what they buy, and then the fork in the road with Danaher over dental.

The succession experiment, and an honest ledger, because this stock has had a fairly difficult 2026, and it's not good to pretend otherwise.

but two housekeeping figures.

Figures are in Swedish kronor, unless I say otherwise, and unless I name another source, the numbers come from LIFCO's own filings.

And the 2025 annual report and the half-year report published on the 14th of July, 2026, LIFCO did not participate in this episode, and the full fact check is in the show notes.

So let's start with the origin story.