TIP819: Lifco AB (LIFCO-B.ST): The Serial Acquirer Building an Unstoppable Compounding Engine w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O'Malley

You're listening to TIP. Today, we discuss one of the titans of serial acquires, a company with over 275 acquisitions under its belt. And no, it's not a vertical market software acquirer. These companies are in niche industrial markets like demolition robotics. You could say it's actually an anti constellation software in nature, but it's still compounding earnings at 14% per year since its IPO, providing investors with multiple decades of sustainable high quality growth. And this signals market beating capital efficiency, which they've accomplished and are continuing to expand on. And what really surprised me was that they haven't diluted shareholders at all while scaling this business up and compounding free cash flow well above 20% since going public. We'll examine Liftoff's past, present, and future today and whether their acquisition criteria will continue generating market meeting returns in the future. You're listening to the Intrinsic Value podcast by The Investor's Podcast Network. Since 2014, with over 180,000,000 downloads, we've learned directly from the world's best investors. Now, we're applying those lessons to analyze businesses and investment opportunities every week, helping you uncover intrinsic value. This show is not investment advice. It's intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own, and they may have investments in the securities discussed. And now, here are your hosts, Sean O'Malley and Kyle Grieve. Hey folks, we have done a number of episodes over the years on serial acquirers. And in our intrinsic value portfolio that we build every week on this show, we do currently own Chapters Group, a serial acquirer in the vertical market software space. And Kyle, I know you're very familiar with that area, where Chapters Group is very much a smaller acquirer with about 50 acquisitions. The company that we'll be discussing today as a potential addition to our intrinsic value portfolio is really a titan of serial acquisition with over two seventy five acquisitions completed. And unlike our portfolio holding Chapters Group or also Constellation Software, which I know is one of the most well known serial acquirers in the world, This business is not in the vertical market software space. Jason Brett (zero zero three:forty seven): That is correct, Sean. So, I began researching Lifco back in about 2022 and I wrote about it on my sub stack before I ended up joining TIP. And funny story, so I actually remember checking my subscribers back then and seeing that their CEO, Herr Waldemarsson, had actually subscribed to my Substack, which I was quite proud of at the time. But as you alluded to, Lifto is definitely not what you would consider a traditional software business. So you and Daniel covered Constellation Software and its family of spin offs, but Liftco is probably about as far away from those types of businesses as you can get. So while the businesses themselves are different than a Constellation or even a Chapters Group, Lifto actually does share quite a …