SKion Water is the water technology platform of SKion GmbH, the investment company of Susanne Klatten, and yes, that is the BMW heiress. It is, by my count, the most prolific private buyer of water companies you have never read a deal price for. My Leviathan database holds 32 SKion-family acquisitions from 2012 through 2024, Ovivo and Paques included, and exactly one purchase has a disclosed price. In December 2025, the quiet compounder did something loud: it sold Ovivo’s Electronics division to Ecolab for roughly 1.8 billion dollars in cash, about twelve times the only price it ever disclosed paying. Three months later, SKion Water’s CEO Reinhard Hübner took over as Ovivo’s CEO to rebuild it. I have had him on my podcast three times since 2022, so let us replay the tapes against my database: what he said, what he bought, why he sold, what comes next.
Who owns SKion Water?
SKion Water is a subsidiary of SKion GmbH, the wholly-owned investment company of Susanne Klatten, daughter of Herbert and Johanna Quandt and holder of about 19% of BMW. Said plainly: the BMW fortune has spent thirteen years quietly building a water empire.
The man running it never planned to be there. Reinhard Hübner is an operations guy with a PhD in mathematical optimization who spent almost two years inside Thames Water working on leakage, hired into SKion in 2010 because Klatten, as he tells it, did not want an investment banker running her water bets but somebody with an industrial background.
First of all, I’m not an investor. My background is operations. … So water is an accident in my life. … [Mrs. Klatten] had decided she wants to do something entrepreneurial in water … [she] didn’t want an investment banker or M&A advisor to do this. [She] wanted somebody with an industrial background in water. That’s why I was hired.
He built what finance people call a platform, a holding company that grows by buying companies and keeping them rather than flipping them, and it is evergreen: one family’s permanent capital, no fund clock. The first water moves in 2012 were minority bets, 20% of the Dutch biotech specialist Paques and a stake in Turkey’s Miranda, and only later was the portfolio grouped into SKion Water as one umbrella, as Reinhard tells it on my 2022 tape, after SKion was named Water Company of the Year.
How many water companies does SKion Water actually buy?
On my 2022 tape, Reinhard gave me the number: “We buy 4 to 8 companies every year. Some of them are publicly announced, some not, or just announced at the local markets…” My deduped Leviathan database shows 32 SKion-family acquisitions from 2012 through 2024, 17 direct and 15 through portfolio companies, with five-deal peaks in 2019 and 2022.
My count and his do not match, so let me walk the gap. The twelve months before the conversation I published in May 2024 show three on the public record: Sanpure in India, VIGAflow in Chile, E2metrix in Quebec. Reinhard says four; his own 2022 caveat reconciles it: some deals are never announced, and a public-record database structurally undercounts a buyer who does not brag. I also removed eight duplicate records my own pipeline had double-ingested before quoting anything (counting is harder than it looks, for me too).
A bolt-on is a smaller acquisition by a company you already own, and SKion runs on them: Ovivo alone made six since 2018, the same pattern H2O Innovation ran for 25 years.
What SKion looks for before it buys
“In a technology acquisition, you have to get your head around the technology,” Reinhard says, and he means it physically: sometimes SKion buys one unit of a machine and tests it before buying the company, and he once put on the gear for digester diving himself (a real job, look it up, and pray you never need it). The scope rule is just as plain: “At heart, we are a treatment company,” meaning water and wastewater treatment plus the services and consumables around it, and explicitly not pipes and networks.
And then there is the discipline rule, which is where his dry side shows, because some business plans he gets pitched assume revenue physics nobody has ever observed.
There’s still amazing business plans where you wonder how somebody with a non-differentiated technology … wants to go to 100 million revenue in 3, 4 years and then have 50 million in profits. I mean, if it was that easy, I would be on a beach now and not in an airport hotel in London, right?
His own distinction is worth keeping: with a system integrator, the reference plants tell you whether they can do the job, while a new technology has to prove itself across many different applications before you can trust it.
Who sells their water company to SKion?
At least 9 of the 32 acquisitions in my database have a documented family or founder on the selling side. ENWA came from the Hanssen family explicitly as a succession-planning sale, GEAL from its two founders, Malmberg Water from a family-owned Swedish group, and the founders of Faxon and Sanpure both stayed on as shareholders. Succession, much more than auctions, is this platform’s native deal flow.
On the 2025 tape, Reinhard explained why that works, the closest thing to a sales pitch I ever heard from him. SKion will never be the highest bidder, he says, because it sells permanence instead: by his telling, nobody left Ovivo after SKion bought it off the stock market. Then comes the line I keep replaying.
Can I buy a company that has been through 3 private equities and give that speech? After 3 private equities … the train has left the station. Companies that are still owned by a founder or a family or something, they get it. They get that story because they know what it’s like. They meet their employees at the bakery or the supermarket in the morning, right?
A succession sale, to give it its name, is a founder or family handing over a business they cannot or do not want to run into the next generation, and it is the one situation where the buyer’s story can beat the buyer’s price. If you want to see who else hunts in that pond, I keep a map of every investor active in water tech.
What is the turnover of SKion Water?
There are no public filings, because SKion Water is private, so the only first-party numbers in existence are on my tapes. On the 2024 one, Reinhard told me: “If you take 2020 as a reference year, we almost tripled in turnover between 2020 and now. We were $500 million-ish in 2020. We’re $1.4 billion budgeted this year.” The 2025 tape adds the proof-of-method on one branch: EnviroChemie had 90 million euros of turnover when SKion bought it in 2013, and the group around it does 350 million today.
Stranger still is how little machinery sits on top. SKion Water is a decentralized holding, meaning the companies keep their names, management, and culture, and the center stays so thin that a group budgeted at 1.4 billion dollars had, by Reinhard’s own 2025 account, no group treasury at all. The price of that choice is real, since European reporting rules like CSRD assume a center that produces paperwork, so a SKion Water Academy now trains the companies instead.
Why did SKion sell Ovivo’s Electronics business to Ecolab?
On August 12, 2025, Ovivo and SKion announced the sale of the Electronics division (ultrapure water for chipmakers) to Ecolab; it closed December 16, 2025, for roughly 1.8 billion US dollars, all cash. For scale: the 2016 take-private, alongside Quebec pension fund CDPQ (30%), paid C$4.00 a share, about 185 million Canadian dollars (142 million US then), the only price SKion ever disclosed. Quick maths: 1.8 billion over 142 million means one division sold for over twelve times the entire company’s 2016 valuation.
Why sell, when the pitch is permanence? The market answer, 2025: “valuations have gone up to a level that personally I think long-term is not healthy,” which politely means: offered silly money, even a permanent owner does the math. His portfolio answer was already on my 2022 tape.
When EnviroChemie talks about ultra-pure water, they talk about pharma, water for injection. When you ask an Ovivo guy about water for injection, it’s way too dirty to even think of taking it seriously because what we inject into the body is far dirtier than what we need for semiconductors … you drink a few liters of that, you die.
A carve-out is selling one division while keeping the rest; this one cut cleanly because semiconductor water shared nothing with its siblings; Ecolab’s release names its motive: a bigger position along the AI value chain. I dissected the consequences in What the Ovivo Deal is Changing for YOU, and the next one is a click away subscribe.
What happens to Ovivo now?
Three weeks before the deal closed, I sat with Reinhard and the Ovivo team, and he set a clock on the record: “In 10 years, Ovivo will be back at the size where it is today. No doubt.” The ingredients he names are specific: Cembrane’s silicon carbide membranes rolled out across the whole group, PFAS destruction as a second growth engine, and a North American industrial business modeled on Europe’s 350-million-euro EnviroChemie group, targeted at 200 to 300 million dollars. His timeline answer could come from a project manager: “Give me 18 [months], because first we need to close the transaction.”
I need a platform first. We need something inorganic. … You can start from scratch to hire some good people and build an industrial business, but then it’s not gonna be finished before I retire. And I’m not gonna retire soon, so no, we need to expedite this a bit.
The carve-out mechanics are unglamorous and he does not hide them: transition services, the contractual period where the seller keeps running systems for the buyer, people moving between entities, plus the odd bonus that Ovivo’s head office, drilled by listed-company years, now lends the group capabilities it never built. Then, four months after our conversation, came the kicker: on March 31, 2026, Reinhard himself took over as Ovivo’s CEO, succeeding Marc Barbeau, on top of his SKion Water duties. The man who opened my 2022 tape with “I’m not an investor” went from operator to investor and back to operator, and he owned his words doing it.
Scoring the slowdown promise, two years on
This has become a running gag between us, and I planted it in the episode’s cold open: every conversation with Reinhard or his colleague Dirk Brusis starts with some variant of “actually, we are slowing it down a bit.” Then, minutes later in the same conversation: “We did 4 acquisitions, there’s 2 more in the pipeline.”
Every time they answer me something like, ‘Actually, we are slowing it down a bit,’ you can see it in their eyes, they believe deeply that they are really slowing down. But then, in the same conversation just minutes later, you’ll hear, ‘We did 4 acquisitions, there’s 2 more in the pipeline.’
So let us score the May 2024 claims with two years of hindsight. Pipeline deal number one materialized four months later, when Malmberg Water joined through ENWA in September 2024, a lovely Russian doll given that ENWA itself had only been bought the year before. Pipeline deal number two never surfaced publicly, which means it either quietly closed or quietly died, and I genuinely cannot tell you which. And 2025 closed with zero visible acquisitions and one 1.8 billion dollar sale, so the slowdown finally arrived, in the loudest way available to a quiet company, though his own wave theory (“you acquire and then at some point you also have to do the homework”) plus the 18-month rebuild clock say the machine restarts soon.
What does the EPA’s PFAS rule have to do with a German buyer?
On April 10, 2024, the US EPA announced the first federal drinking water limits for PFAS, the synthetic “forever chemicals”: 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, with compliance due by 2029. A part per trillion is roughly one drop in twenty Olympic pools. Days later, at the Global Water Summit in London, Reinhard said the quiet part: “It’s hard to achieve and it’s impossible to pay for, but PFAS is a real problem…”
By May 2026, the EPA had come most of the way to his position, proposing to keep the PFOA and PFOS limits but extend compliance to 2031, and to rescind the other compounds’ limits entirely. The affordability call aged well, and it explains the buying: SKion first invested in, then acquired E2metrix, the Quebec electrochemical PFAS-destruction company, because destroying the molecule where you catch it beats trucking contaminated filter media around. On the 2025 tape, PFAS is an Ovivo rebuild pillar, with the know-how sitting squarely in North America (“nobody knows more about PFAS than these guys here”, and, as he corrected himself, girls).
Nothing in the water industry will happen in 12 months on large scale, right? 12 years maybe. But if we get one or two systems in the next 12 months where we show that we can do on site PFAS destruction in a way that safely eliminates it … then that would be nice for us and also important for this problem.
The buyers’ leaderboard nobody publishes
Since I have the database open anyway, here is SKion next to everyone else, because the biggest buyers in water are not who you think. By distinct targets 2012 to 2025 in my Leviathan database, the volume kings are utility consolidators and point-of-use roll-ups: American Water 145, Essential Utilities 128, Waterlogic 99. A roll-up is the strategy of buying many small similar businesses to build one big one, and buying ten municipal systems a year, every year, is a different sport from buying technology companies.
Filter for the technology game SKion actually plays and the tier reads: Suez 48, the engineering consolidator Stantec 48, Evoqua 28 before Xylem absorbed it in 2023, and SKion right among them with 30 distinct targets across its 32 deals. One difference: every other name there publishes prices, files accounts, or answers to shareholders, while SKion discloses essentially nothing and answers to one family. Which is why you read it the way we just did: three tapes, four years apart, checked against a deal graph it never knew existed.
FAQ
Who owns SKion Water?
SKion Water is a subsidiary of SKion GmbH, the investment company wholly owned by Susanne Klatten, the BMW heiress and Germany’s wealthiest woman. It groups her water technology holdings (Ovivo, Paques, EnviroChemie, ELIQUO, Adasa, ENWA, and others) under one umbrella, led by Reinhard Hübner, who has run Klatten’s water investments since 2010.
What is the turnover of SKion Water?
No public filings exist. The only first-party figures are Reinhard Hübner’s statements on my podcast: roughly $500 million in 2020 and $1.4 billion budgeted for 2024, before the 2025 sale of Ovivo’s Electronics division removed a large semiconductor-water business from the group.
Who owns Ovivo?
SKion Water has owned Ovivo since the 2016 take-private (70% at first, 100% since 2020, after buying out partner CDPQ). Ovivo’s Electronics division was sold to Ecolab in December 2025; the rest of Ovivo remains a SKion Water company, with Reinhard Hübner as CEO since March 2026.
How many companies does SKion Water buy per year?
Reinhard Hübner’s own figure is 4 to 8 per year, including deals that are never publicly announced. My Leviathan database verifies 32 SKion-family acquisitions from 2012 to 2024, averaging about 2.5 visible deals per year with peaks of five in 2019 and 2022.
Why did SKion sell Ovivo’s Electronics business?
Two reasons on tape, one in Ecolab’s release: semiconductor ultrapure water shared zero overlap with the rest of the portfolio, valuations had risen to levels the CEO called long-term not healthy, and Ecolab paid roughly $1.8 billion in cash to extend its AI-and-semiconductor water platform.
Will Ovivo grow back after the Ecolab deal?
That is the stated plan: “back at the size where it is today” within ten years, built on Cembrane’s silicon carbide membranes, PFAS destruction, and a new North American industrial water business targeting $200 to 300 million in turnover, with Reinhard Hübner now running Ovivo directly.
The thing to watch is the deals nobody announces
I will leave you with the two bets Reinhard says come next. One is water recycling, since “the water is running out in many places,” and he now counts Germany among them, a sentence he admits he never expected to say. The other is modular, off-site plant building, factories assembling treatment plants from forty-foot modules so nobody has to run a multi-year construction site inside a customer’s facility. Map those two onto a fragmented industry where maybe a hundred companies worldwide have the profile to become platforms (I ran that screen in my newsletter, and the bottleneck is real), and you get a fairly precise picture of SKion’s next decade: more family successions, more quiet local-market deals, and somewhere down the line, the rebuilt Ovivo proving the model twice. The press releases will tell you almost nothing, and that is rather the point: with SKion Water, the deals worth knowing about are precisely the ones nobody announces, which is why I will keep my database open and the microphone on.
Sources
- Bloomberg Billionaires Index, “Susanne Klatten” · www.bloomberg.com
- SKion Water, “About us” · www.skionwater.com
- Ecolab, “Ecolab Closes Acquisition of Ovivo’s Electronics Ultrapure Water Business”, December 2025 · www.ecolab.com
- Evertiq, “Ecolab to acquire Ovivo’s electronics business for $1.8 billion”, August 15, 2025 · evertiq.com
- Ovivo, “Ovivo announces Completion of Acquisition by SKion and la Caisse”, September 2016 · www.ovivowater.com
- Water Online, “SKion And La Caisse Partner To Acquire Ovivo For Cash Consideration Of $4.00 Per Share; 38% 30-Day VWAP Premium”, July 2016 · www.wateronline.com
- PE Hub, “Ovivo to be acquired by SKion, CDPQ in $185 mln deal”, 2016 · www.pehub.com
- SKion Water, “Malmberg Water becomes part of ELIQUO”, September 17, 2024 · www.skionwater.com
- Ovivo, “Ovivo Announces Leadership Transition”, January 2026 · www.ovivowater.com
- Smart Water Magazine, “Marc Barbeau to step down as Ovivo CEO, Reinhard Hübner named successor”, January 2026 · smartwatermagazine.com
- Federal Register, “PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation”, April 26, 2024 · www.federalregister.gov
- US EPA, “Proposed PFOA and PFOS Compliance Extension Rule”, proposed May 18, 2026 · www.epa.gov
- US EPA, “EPA Announces It Will Keep Maximum Contaminant Levels for PFOA, PFOS”, May 2025 · www.epa.gov
- White & Case, “EPA partially rolls back PFAS drinking water rule”, 2026 · www.whitecase.com