What is Water-as-a-Service?

Start with the model, because the whole story lives there. Henry is blunt about it: “the technology is not the problem,” he told me, “the delivery model, the business model is the solution to our biggest infrastructure problems.”

In the normal world, a town buys a plant. It borrows the money, hires a firm to design and build it, and then owns and runs it more or less forever. Water-as-a-Service flips every one of those verbs onto the provider. Seven Seas finds the capital, builds the plant, owns it for good, operates it, and you simply buy the treated water, usually a fixed charge that pays down the plant plus a price per cubic meter you actually use. You are not buying a machine, you are buying water, the way you buy electricity. Seven Seas liked the idea enough to trademark the name, WaaS, which tells you they think the model, not the membrane, is the product.

Where it sits: the water delivery-model zoo

“A private company runs a water plant” hides at least six different deals, and the line that separates them is simple: who puts capital at risk, and who ends up owning the thing. At one end is Design-Bid-Build, where the city pays for everything and owns it forever. In between sit the half-measures: Design-Build-Operate, where the city still finances and owns the plant but hires one team to build and run it; and Build-Operate-Transfer, where a private builder fronts the cash, runs the plant for twenty or thirty years, then hands the keys back. Water-as-a-Service is the far end, where the provider pays, owns, and the keys never change hands at all. You just keep buying the water.

If that picture feels abstract, the table below puts the who-pays, who-owns and who-runs of each model side by side.

The real innovation is the deal, not the desalination

Here is the part I find genuinely clever, and it has nothing to do with membranes. The desalination itself is decades-old, widely available technology. The breakthrough is the deal. As Henry tells it, water has always had two camps that refuse to talk to each other: the engineering builders, who can size a pump but freeze when you ask them for an IRR (the internal rate of return, the yardstick for what a project earns), and the project-finance money, which can write the check but often cannot spell reverse osmosis. Water-as-a-Service forces those two into one company that gets paid only when the water flows, which kills the margin each camp would otherwise stack on the other.

And the model compounds. Henry’s real moat is not a plant, it is having done this so often that he no longer needs a fresh financial close, new engineers, or “a new lawyer that tells us how the water-as-a-service agreements work” for every deal. Do it once and it is hard. Do it 200 times and it is a machine.

Why doesn’t the US just do this everywhere?

If the model is this good, why hasn’t every thirsty American city switched? Because of a wall called Design-Bid-Build, built from two materials. The first is law: almost every US state requires public construction to go to the “lowest responsible bidder,” which needs a finished design to bid against, which legally splits design from construction. That split, mandated by statute, is the US municipal default.

The second material is decisive: cheap money. A city borrows through tax-exempt municipal bonds that run roughly 150 to 210 basis points below what a private company pays, topped up by the federal State Revolving Funds (about $133 billion in loans over 25 years) and WIFIA. So a US utility’s own credit is cheaper than any private owner’s, and it rarely needs a private balance sheet at all. Add that about 80% of Americans get their water from a government-owned system, plus a long memory of privatizations that soured (Atlanta handed its water to a private operator in 1998 and took it back by 2003), and you have ground Water-as-a-Service simply cannot occupy.

So where does Water-as-a-Service actually win?

It wins where that wall is thin, and there are three such places. The first is industrial customers: a factory, a mine, or a refinery signs the water contract directly, with no public tender, moving a water plant off its balance sheet so its capital stays in its core business. Henry says these are still “a handful” of his book, but they are the growth leg, and the cleanest pure-play around, Belgium’s listed Ekopak, is built entirely on industrial reuse.

The second is islands and decentralized systems, Seven Seas’ heartland: across the Caribbean and Latin America, where public capital is thin and the cheap-muni market does not exist, a private build-own-operate provider is simply the practical route. Seven Seas is the primary water supplier to the US Virgin Islands, St. Maarten and the British Virgin Islands. The third is anywhere a small, fast, brackish or reuse plant beats a megaproject. Set California’s Carlsbad plant (conceived 1993, opened 2015, around $1 billion) against Henry’s decentralized model, where his crews commission a working island plant in under two months.

The catch: it follows the money, not the thirst

Before you remortgage the house to buy water annuities, here is the catch the brochures skip. A 30-year water contract is only ever as good as the customer signing it. Henry uses a mortgage analogy: “the better your credit rating, the lower your mortgage rate,” and a water deal is no different, because “we need to make sure that we get paid.” So the model needs strong, creditworthy off-takers, which in practice means the US and other wealthy economies, and it struggles exactly where water is scarcest and poorest. The development-finance literature says the same thing in colder language: capital flows to creditworthy buyers, not to need. Water-as-a-Service is a credit instrument first and a water technology second.

There is one tidy exception that proves the rule. The largest market on earth for long-term water-purchase contracts is the Gulf, among the most water-scarce regions there is, but also high-income and state-backed. Scarcity did not unlock it. A guaranteed check did.

Why is a Water-as-a-Service company worth a billion dollars?

Now the part a fund actually pays for. Strip away the water and a book of these contracts is recurring, contracted revenue, locked in for decades, from customers obliged to pay. That is an annuity, and it behaves like a toll road: the predictable, inflation-resistant cash flow infrastructure investors are built to buy. The demand behind it is bottomless: the US alone faces a reported $1.26 trillion in water and wastewater needs over 20 years (US EPA, 2023 to 2024).

Now the arithmetic. In March 2020, Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure arm bought Seven Seas for a reported $500 million. In May 2025, the Swedish investment firm EQT agreed to buy it for a reported $1 billion-plus. By my count, in my own Leviathan database, that is the same asset roughly doubling in five years, while never once ringing a stock-market bell.

What changed in between was not the technology. Henry took a “great company” that had gone “stagnant” and rebuilt its strategy, its team, and a sales pipeline “where before there was none.” Four years, he reminds me, is a nanosecond in infrastructure.

So what did the billion-dollar water exit actually look like?

It looked like a company passed between investors its whole life. Private-equity firms owned Seven Seas through the 2000s. In 2016 its parent, AquaVenture, went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the fitting ticker WAAS, raising about $134.6 million (Renaissance Capital, 2016). In 2020, Culligan took AquaVenture private and carved Seven Seas out, selling it to Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners for a reported $500 million (BusinessWire, March 2020). Then, in May 2025, EQT agreed to buy it for that reported $1 billion-plus (EQT, 2025). Four owners across two decades, and the strange part: of those four prices, only the 2016 IPO was ever officially confirmed.

And the exit was not luck. It was designed from the day Henry took the job. When he interviewed with Morgan Stanley, he asked the only question that mattered: what is your exit strategy, and is an IPO an option? They told him plainly it was not. So from September 2021, everyone knew exactly what ending they were building toward, which is roughly how you actually buy a water company and turn a profit.

Who is Seven Seas Water, exactly?

Quick context, because, again, you have rightly never heard of them. Seven Seas Water Group has been treating water for about two decades. Today it runs more than 200 desalination and wastewater plants across the US, the Caribbean and Latin America, from islands like the US Virgin Islands all the way to Peru, with headquarters split between Tampa, Florida and Houston, Texas. Its core trick is brackish-water desalination, taking water that is salty but not quite seawater and making it drinkable, plus wastewater treatment through its AUC division. Not a household name, just the quiet plumbing behind a lot of other people’s taps. Which is exactly the kind of unglamorous, mission-critical infrastructure that hides in plain sight until a fund pays a reported billion for it.

Why do these water companies sell to funds instead of going public?

So if the model is this good, why has Seven Seas never simply floated? Henry’s answer is that public markets are “a cyclical animal,” and that water is tiny by stock-market standards, mostly regulated utilities and the firms selling “pumps, pipes, valves.” Private owners can price the contracted future; public markets mostly price last year’s profit. So the annuity keeps trading privately, between infrastructure funds. Morgan Stanley, then EQT, with Ember, KKR and XPV chasing the same playbook, and the price tags to match: KKR paid a reported $2.07 billion for the environmental group Ecorbit in 2024, while a closer cousin, H2O Innovation, went private for C$395 million. This is water privatization in slow motion. I asked the same question of a far bigger name in 600 private water bets and zero public exits, watched another platform turn bolt-ons into a reported $1.8 billion exit, and mapped the patient money behind it in how HG Ventures became a top-5 water investor. I even sorted water’s investors into three tribes once, because I am, as ever, fun at parties. Subscribe to the (don’t) Waste Water newsletter here.

How to invest in water if you’re not a billion-dollar fund

So can you, personally, own a slice of this? Mostly, no, and it is worth being honest about that. The Seven Seas kind of deal lives behind billion-dollar infrastructure funds with institutional minimums, not a brokerage app. What is actually open to you is the unglamorous public half Henry described: listed water utilities, the big equipment makers, and a handful of genuine water-focused funds and ETFs (an ETF being a basket of stocks you buy in a single click). The recurring water-as-a-service upside, the annuity that EQT just paid a reported billion for, stays almost entirely private. Henry, for what it is worth, defines a “water company” generously, counting even firms that simply help others use less of it, so if you go looking, look wider than the obvious utilities.

The frontier Henry keeps pointing at is the “third leg,” industrial Water-as-a-Service, factories handing their entire water headache to an operator and keeping their own capital for their own business. And my crystal ball still says the one chapter Seven Seas keeps skipping, an actual IPO, is the most likely next one, the very thing the whole sector keeps not doing. Whichever way EQT eventually rings that bell, the lesson holds. In water, the billion-dollar moments rarely arrive with a gong on an exchange floor. They happen quietly, between people who understood the delivery model long before anyone else was listening. Go listen to the full conversation with Henry on the podcast, it is genuinely worth your time, and it will change how you read the next water headline.

Frequently asked questions

What is Water-as-a-Service (WaaS)?

A model where a company builds, owns and operates a water or wastewater plant and sells the treated water under a long-term contract, instead of selling the plant itself. The customer pays for water, usually a fixed charge that covers the plant plus a price per cubic meter, with no upfront capital; the operator carries the financing and the risk. Seven Seas Water trademarked the term.

How is Water-as-a-Service different from Build-Operate-Transfer or Design-Build-Operate?

Under Design-Build-Operate, the public customer finances and owns the plant the whole time and just hires one team to design, build and run it. Under Build-Operate-Transfer, a private developer finances and runs it for 20 to 30 years, then hands ownership back. Under Water-as-a-Service, the provider owns the plant for good and you never own it, you only ever buy the water.

Why doesn’t US municipal water use Water-as-a-Service?

Two reasons. Low-bid procurement laws push cities into Design-Bid-Build, where the public owner finances and owns the plant. And tax-exempt municipal bonds plus federal loan funds make public capital cheaper than any private owner’s, so a US city rarely needs a private balance sheet. WaaS therefore concentrates on industrial customers, islands and decentralized systems instead.

Who owns Seven Seas Water?

EQT Infrastructure, through its EQT Infrastructure VI fund, since its 2025 acquisition from Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners. Before that it belonged to Morgan Stanley (2020 to 2025), and earlier to AquaVenture Holdings and its public shareholders (NYSE: WAAS), with Culligan owning the parent briefly in 2020.

What did EQT pay for Seven Seas Water?

It was never officially disclosed. Sources put the enterprise value above $1 billion including debt, on a deal agreed on 22 May 2025, roughly double the reported $500 million Morgan Stanley paid for the same business in 2020.

How big is the water-as-a-service market?

There is no single reliable figure: independent estimates put growth at roughly 7 to 13% a year through the early 2030s, but the absolute market-size numbers vary about threefold between firms. The hard number is the demand behind it: the US EPA puts 20-year US water and wastewater needs at about $1.26 trillion.

How do you invest in water?

For most people, through listed water utilities, water-equipment makers, and water-focused funds or ETFs. Direct stakes in private water-as-a-service operators like Seven Seas are generally limited to institutional investors and large infrastructure funds. —

Sources

1. Primary source: the (don’t) Waste Water podcast, S13E15, “What Does a Billion-Dollar Company Exit Really Look Like?” with Henry Charrabe, CEO of Seven Seas Water Group. youtube.com/watch?v=sd2tCuwMKfk (retrieved 2026-06-13).
2. EQT to acquire Seven Seas Water Group, EQT, press release, 22 May 2025: enterprise value reported to exceed US$1bn including debt; financial details not officially disclosed. eqtgroup.com (retrieved 2026-06-13).
3. Seven Seas Water acquired by Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners (reported ~US$500M), BusinessWire, 30 March 2020; Conyers, “US$500 million acquisition of Seven Seas Water.” businesswire.com (retrieved 2026-06-13).
4. AquaVenture Holdings IPO (NYSE: WAAS, ~US$134.6M gross), October 2016, Renaissance Capital / PRNewswire. renaissancecapital.com (retrieved 2026-06-13).
5. Proprietary analysis and deal records: Leviathan, my water M&A database (EQT 2025, AquaVenture 2007, Aguas de Panama 2020 deal records; the reported ~US$500M to ~US$1bn+ step-up), verified 2026-06-13.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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).

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

1. Bloomberg Billionaires Index, “Susanne Klatten” · www.bloomberg.com
2. SKion Water, “About us” · www.skionwater.com
3. Ecolab, “Ecolab Closes Acquisition of Ovivo’s Electronics Ultrapure Water Business”, December 2025 · www.ecolab.com
4. Evertiq, “Ecolab to acquire Ovivo’s electronics business for $1.8 billion”, August 15, 2025 · evertiq.com
5. Ovivo, “Ovivo announces Completion of Acquisition by SKion and la Caisse”, September 2016 · www.ovivowater.com
6. 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
7. PE Hub, “Ovivo to be acquired by SKion, CDPQ in $185 mln deal”, 2016 · www.pehub.com
8. SKion Water, “Malmberg Water becomes part of ELIQUO”, September 17, 2024 · www.skionwater.com
9. Ovivo, “Ovivo Announces Leadership Transition”, January 2026 · www.ovivowater.com
10. Smart Water Magazine, “Marc Barbeau to step down as Ovivo CEO, Reinhard Hübner named successor”, January 2026 · smartwatermagazine.com
11. Federal Register, “PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation”, April 26, 2024 · www.federalregister.gov
12. US EPA, “Proposed PFOA and PFOS Compliance Extension Rule”, proposed May 18, 2026 · www.epa.gov
13. US EPA, “EPA Announces It Will Keep Maximum Contaminant Levels for PFOA, PFOS”, May 2025 · www.epa.gov
14. White & Case, “EPA partially rolls back PFAS drinking water rule”, 2026 · www.whitecase.com

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