In Health & Beauty, acquisitions are rarely isolated transactions. The strongest strategies are built around a sequence of moves: securing capacity, adding technologies, expanding geographically, moving upstream or downstream in the value chain, and ensuring that every new acquisition makes the overall platform stronger.
Richard Juhel, General Manager of Lilentech, has spent more than a decade advising industrial groups, private equity funds and family-owned businesses on acquisitions in the Health & Beauty sector across Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America.
His track record includes transactions involving Anjac Health & Beauty, Albéa, HCP Packaging, Arcade Beauty and several investment groups. He has advised Anjac Health & Beauty on six acquisitions in total, illustrating a rare ability to support a client not simply on one transaction, but over a genuine multi-step build-up journey.
Recent assignments include Health & Beauty acquisition screenings for Blackstone in South Korea, Mexico and Southern Europe throughout 2025, as well as ongoing operations in Southern Europe in 2026.
We asked him how companies should think about build-up strategies and why the best acquisition target is not necessarily the best company available.
Because a good acquisition strategy is rarely about the next move only.
The comparison with chess is also relevant because the opening moves are so important. In chess, the first few moves often determine the structure of the game, the options that will be available later and sometimes the entire direction of play. M&A can work in exactly the same way.
Your first acquisition can define the platform, the geography, the capabilities and even the type of targets that will become relevant afterwards. A poor opening move can constrain the rest of the build-up. A strong one can create many more strategic options.
Before approaching a target, management therefore needs to have a reasonably clear picture of what the company should look like after two, three or even five acquisitions.
The first acquisition may give you production capacity. The second may bring a technology you do not have. The third may provide access to a new geography. The fourth may allow you to integrate a critical step of the value chain.
Taken independently, each transaction may look interesting. But the real question is whether those transactions work together.
That is why I like the chess analogy. You do not move a piece simply because the move is available. You make the opening moves with the rest of the game already in mind.
They should certainly define the direction.
You need to know what you are trying to build: additional capacity, geographical coverage, new customers, technological capabilities, vertical integration, product diversification or some combination of these.
But once the strategy has been established, you also have to be extremely pragmatic.
There is no value in designing a build-up around companies that will never be available.
Some businesses are committed to continuing as family-owned companies. Others have recently been acquired by a large group whose objective is itself to grow the business. Some shareholders simply have no reason to sell.
An M&A strategy therefore has to combine ambition with a very realistic understanding of which targets are genuinely actionable.
That is one of the areas where an experienced adviser can add considerable value.
The word “build-up” is sometimes used too loosely.
Buying three companies does not automatically constitute a build-up.
A genuine build-up exists when each acquisition reinforces a common platform.
For example, a company might first acquire a business providing additional manufacturing capacity, then buy a specialist technology company whose expertise can be deployed across all its factories, and finally acquire a business in another geography where those same capabilities can be commercialised.
The value does not come simply from adding EBITDA.
It comes from the interaction between the businesses.
I normally separate them into several categories, but two are particularly important in industrial Health & Beauty transactions.
The first is capacitary synergy.
You acquire additional manufacturing capacity, access to a new plant, new filling lines, new customers or additional geographic coverage.
The second is complementarity, particularly vertical or technological complementarity.
You acquire a capability that the group previously outsourced or did not possess: formulation, primary packaging, decoration, filling, fragrance production, aerosol capability, pharmaceutical manufacturing, for example.
The most attractive transactions often combine several of these dimensions.
Capacity should not be interpreted simply as “more machines”.
An acquisition can improve the utilisation of existing assets, give access to customers the group could not previously serve, reduce transport distances or strengthen the group's industrial footprint.
It can also allow production to be redistributed between facilities.
Imagine that one factory is operating close to saturation while another acquisition gives you complementary equipment and available capacity. The synergy can be much more important than the target's standalone profitability suggests.
This is why industrial understanding matters enormously in Health & Beauty M&A.
You cannot evaluate those synergies purely from a spreadsheet.
You need to understand what the factories actually do.
Vertical integration can change the economics of an entire platform.
Suppose a company currently purchases an important component or outsources a production step.
Acquiring that capability may allow the group to capture additional margin, shorten lead times, secure supply and improve product development.
But the most interesting question is whether the new capability can be used by the rest of the group.
If you acquire a technology that generates synergies across five existing businesses, and potentially across future acquisitions, the strategic value can be significantly greater than the EBITDA of the acquired company itself.
Absolutely.
An additive synergy might be eliminating duplicated headquarters costs following an acquisition.
That is valuable, but relatively easy to calculate.
A multiplicative synergy is different.
Imagine acquiring a company with a specific formulation technology, manufacturing process or commercial capability that can improve the performance of every other company within the group.
Suddenly, the acquisition is not creating value only within the target.
It is creating value across the entire platform.
And every subsequent acquisition potentially increases the value of that capability again.
That is one of the most powerful aspects of a well-designed build-up strategy.
It gives you a very different perspective.
When you work on successive acquisitions for the same group, you see how the strategic logic evolves over time.
For Anjac Health & Beauty alone, I advised on six acquisitions in total. Among the transactions publicly highlighted in my track record are Aircos Cosmetics and Pascual Cosmetics in France, Cosmetix West in California, Apollo Health & Beauty in Canada and Pillar5 Pharma in Canada.
When you participate in a sequence of transactions like this, you are no longer looking at each company as an isolated acquisition.
You begin to understand how each deal can progressively reinforce the group's industrial footprint, technologies, customer access, geographic reach and overall positioning.
That cumulative dimension is fundamental to a successful build-up strategy.
Very much so.
When you know the group well, you understand its industrial strengths, its limitations, its management culture and the type of company it can realistically integrate.
You also know what has worked in previous acquisitions and what has been more difficult.
That makes the next screening much more precise.
Instead of starting from a blank page, you can ask: what is still missing from the platform? Where are the remaining gaps? What capability would create the greatest leverage across the businesses already acquired?
In a build-up, that accumulated knowledge can be extremely valuable.
The principle is similar, although the industrial dynamics may be different.
For HCP Packaging, transactions included SIMP in France in 2016 and Rusi Cosmetics in Germany in 2017.
For Albéa, transactions included Orchard Cosmetics in Canada in 2019 and Fasten in the Netherlands later that year.
These examples illustrate how M&A can be used to strengthen not only geographic footprint but also product capabilities, technologies and customer relationships.
In packaging and beauty manufacturing, those dimensions are closely interconnected.
A new capability can create commercial opportunities with customers already served elsewhere in the group.
Extremely important.
Health & Beauty is global, but manufacturing remains surprisingly regional in many categories.
Customers want proximity, supply-chain resilience, regulatory familiarity and increasingly the ability to manufacture products in several regions.
This means that a European company acquiring in North America is not simply buying revenue.
It may be creating a North American industrial platform.
The same logic applies in Asia or Latin America.
That is why screening exercises have to go well beyond identifying the companies with the highest EBITDA.
During 2025, for example, we conducted Health & Beauty screenings for Blackstone covering South Korea, Mexico and Southern Europe.
Those markets have very different industrial structures, ownership patterns and acquisition dynamics.
It starts with understanding the investment thesis.
If the strategy is unclear, you simply produce a long list of companies.
That is rarely useful.
We normally try to understand what capability is missing from the platform and then identify the companies capable of filling that gap.
After that, you need to assess something that is often underestimated: targetability.
Who owns the company?
Is it family-owned?
Is there succession?
Has the business recently been acquired?
Is it already part of a larger strategic group?
Does the shareholder have ambitions to continue consolidating rather than sell?
There is no point spending six months analysing an outstanding business if there is effectively zero probability of acquiring it.
Exactly.
This is one of the most important lessons in acquisition strategy.
The theoretically perfect company may be completely unavailable.
Meanwhile, another company that initially appears slightly less attractive might be realistically actionable and create enormous synergies with the existing platform.
You have to optimise for strategic value and feasibility simultaneously.
M&A is not an academic exercise.
I would classify each target according to the role it could play in the future group.
Then I would assess the interactions between them.
The question becomes less “Is Target A better than Target B?” and more “What happens if we acquire A, then B, then C?”
Sometimes a relatively modest acquisition becomes highly attractive because it unlocks the value of another transaction.
Very significantly.
Suppose you want to build a business in North America.
The first acquisition may need to provide management, infrastructure and customer credibility. That becomes the platform.
The next acquisition can then be smaller and more specialised because the infrastructure already exists.
Reverse the sequence and the same transaction may be much harder to integrate.
This is another reason why I describe M&A as a chess game.
Sequence matters.
Not necessarily.
The first platform needs to be strong enough to support subsequent acquisitions, but size alone is not the criterion.
You need management quality, systems, operational discipline and the ability to absorb additional businesses.
Sometimes acquiring a slightly smaller but operationally stronger company is a much better starting point than acquiring the largest competitor.
The platform has to become the foundation of the build-up.
One is falling in love with targets.
Management identifies a well-known company and then tries to make the strategy fit the target.
It should be the other way around.
Another mistake is looking only at financial synergies.
In industrial M&A, some of the strongest value creation comes from production optimisation, procurement, technical know-how, customer cross-selling, geographic coverage and better utilisation of assets.
A third mistake is underestimating integration.
The value of a build-up does not come from signing transactions.
It comes from making the acquired companies operate better together.
Because two companies that look similar financially can be completely different industrially.
A plant visit can sometimes tell you more than 50 pages of financial analysis.
You look at equipment, flows, maintenance, automation, quality systems, available floor space, technical teams and how the site is actually managed.
You also look at what could realistically be transferred from another plant or what additional volumes the facility could absorb.
That allows you to distinguish theoretical synergies from operationally achievable ones.
An industrial facility can bring several things simultaneously: equipment, people, know-how, certifications, customers and additional capacity.
The strategic analysis therefore has to go far beyond the site's historical P&L.
You have to ask what the facility could become inside the buyer's network.
That forward-looking analysis is where much of the acquisition value lies.
Private equity has made the process more systematic.
Funds increasingly begin with a clear investment thesis and then map the market very aggressively.
But the strongest industrial groups have been doing something similar for a long time.
The important distinction is between financial consolidation and industrial consolidation.
Buying businesses at one multiple and eventually selling a larger group at another multiple is one source of value.
But the more defensible strategy is to create an organisation that is genuinely more valuable because the companies operate better together.
Yes.
In a one-off transaction, the adviser may focus primarily on identifying a target and getting the deal completed.
In a build-up, the role is broader.
You need to understand the endgame, identify the capabilities that are missing, map realistic targets, assess the order in which acquisitions should happen and keep updating the strategy as the platform evolves.
You are helping the client build a company, not just close a transaction.
That is a very different mindset.
The sector combines several characteristics that make M&A particularly interesting.
There is a very fragmented supplier base, a strong presence of family-owned businesses, highly specialised industrial capabilities and increasingly international customers.
At the same time, there are significant technical barriers: formulation expertise, regulatory requirements, quality systems, specific filling technologies, packaging know-how and customer qualification processes.
This creates many opportunities for build-up strategies, but also means that understanding the industrial reality of each target is essential.
Two companies may both describe themselves as cosmetics manufacturers while having completely different capabilities and strategic value.
Of course.
More acquisitions do not automatically mean more value.
Every transaction adds management complexity, systems complexity and integration risk.
The objective is therefore not to acquire as many companies as possible.
It is to acquire the right companies in the right sequence and to ensure that the organisation has the capacity to absorb them.
A good build-up should become stronger with each acquisition, not more fragile.
Do not start by asking, “Which company can I buy?”
Start by asking, “What company do I want to become?”
Then identify the capabilities required to reach that position.
Map the targets that can provide those capabilities.
Be realistic about which companies can actually be acquired.
And think several transactions ahead.
The objective is not to complete the greatest number of acquisitions.
It is to ensure that every acquisition makes the next one more valuable.
That is what transforms a succession of deals into a genuine build-up strategy.