Bain Capital Private Equity: the New Owners of Diversey

DIVERSEY, A HYGIENE and cleaning solutions company, announced that the purchase of the business by Bain Capital Private Equity from Sealed Air Corporation (NYSE:SEE) is complete. The transaction was previously announced on March 27, 2017. Diversey will now be a standalone company that will include the Diversey Care division of Sealed Air as well as the food hygiene solution business that was part of its Food Care division.

Himanshu Jain, President, APAC, Diversey, spoke to BW Hotelier, elaborating the company’s strategy to grow the business and explaining the importance of cleaning and hygiene in the industries. “With the Bain Capital being the new owners of Diversey, the whole focus of the company now has moved to the single vertical. We are now expecting more focused management of time, faster decision speed, more innovations and higher drive, our ambitions are much higher than what we used to have at Sealed Air,” he said.

Diversey integrates chemicals, floor care machines, tools and equipment, with a wide range of technology based value-added services, food safety services and water and energy management. It serves customers in the hospitality, healthcare, food and beverage, food service, retail and facility management sectors.

Speaking about the growth plan in India, Jain said, “We have historically grown in India with high double digits and we expect to regain that very quickly and accelerate beyond that. To me my ambition for India would be high double digits, definitely not starting with one.” Adding more to this he said, “In spite of our clear leadership in our market, we still believe that we are in the range of 30-35 per cent of the market share. This is the market which is today served by the consumer products, small players and our largest competitors.”

Jain gave emphasis to increase the penetration in the Indian market. He feels that the cleaning process is an investment rather than a cost. “Historically, cleaning has been a chores. That’s where we are expecting to increase our education process, by educating the customer that cleaning is the highest return on investment of any facility,” he stated.

Jain told us about the initiative Garima, where the company is skilling unemployed people of any age profile to become a hygiene technician, away from what they used to be called as a cleaner. “We take them into seven to ten day programme and certify and guarantee them employment. Presently, we are working in Jammu Kashmir, Bihar, UP, Meerut, Mumbai and Tamil Nadu. We have so far trained 2500 people this year,” he added.

Speaking about some of the new solutions offered by the company, he said, “One of the solution which is going extremely well is ‘flush me not’, waterless urinals that has no infrastructure cost. We have converted up to 6000 to 7000 urinals in the country and have saved about 250 million litres of water. The other product which we are working into is low temp. technology solution; programme called the smart cleaning and robotic solutions. We have a large R and D centre at Mumbai which contains a global fabric care lab in India.”

Commenting upon the Indian hospitality sector he concluded, “I think in Indian hospitality differentiation is quite limited, with lot of budget hotels coming into place they lack standardisation and over the period of time they tend to decline. It lacks scale and we are not that long term in our approach. According to me Turkey and Thailand can be a great example setter for us.”