Reinhard Hübner

Reinhard Hübner is the rare person who runs a billion-euro water group and will tell you, in the first minute, that he is not an investor. His background is operations, he did manufacturing logistics, and his doctorate at TU Berlin was on the mathematical optimization of specialty-chemicals production networks, which is about as far from water as a serious career gets. As he puts it, water was an accident in his life. He got asked to do a project for a utility in the UK, said yes mostly because it was in London and he had a friend there he had not seen in four years, and ended up spending close to two years inside Thames Water working on leakage. That is where the water bug bit, and it bit on the operations side, not the spreadsheet side.

Reinhard Hübner spent eight years at McKinsey, where he sat on the firm's water-industry leadership team, before Susanne Klatten, the BMW heiress whose investment company is SKion, hired him in 2010 to do something entrepreneurial in water. The important detail is who she did not want: she did not want an investment banker or an M&A advisor, she wanted somebody with an industrial water background, which is exactly why she picked an operations guy who had never done a deal. So Hübner learned investing on the job, starting from a blank sheet of paper, and the very first thing they tried, a startup investment in chemicals-free cooling-tower treatment, was a flop. He is candid about it: they lost significant money, and the lesson stuck, which is that a new water technology has to be 20 to 30% better than what is already out there to overcome how risk-averse and fragmented this industry is.

Reinhard Hübner turned that scar tissue into a strategy. Rather than betting on single breakthrough gadgets, SKion Water grew by buying established, profitable water-treatment companies and letting them keep running, more or less independently, under one umbrella, sharing technology and customers behind the scenes. The cadence is genuinely relentless: we buy 4 to 8 companies every year, he says, some announced, many not, because the water sector is so fragmented that the pipeline never really runs dry. Out of that buy-and-build came a group of operating companies including Ovivo, EnviroChemie, ELIQUO, Paques and others, which SKion Water now reports as roughly EUR 1 billion in sales and more than 4,500 people. He is careful to frame it as collaboration rather than conquest, his line being that they have no intention of ruling this world and could not if they tried.

Reinhard Hübner's signature move was the one he calls the wildest journey: in 2016 SKion Water teamed up with the Quebec pension fund CDPQ to take the listed Canadian water company Ovivo private, then used it as the platform to bolt on more businesses. The plot twist came in 2025, when Ovivo agreed to sell its prized electronics-water division to Ecolab in a deal valuing that unit alone at around 2.4 billion Canadian dollars, which is the kind of number that quietly proves the whole thesis that water assets are worth real money. On 31 March 2026 he stepped up to run Ovivo itself as CEO, on top of leading SKion Water, and his ambition for the slimmed-down company is blunt and specific: in ten years, he says, Ovivo will be back at the size it is today, rebuilt on silicon-carbide membranes (a technology called Cembrane), on PFAS destruction, and on a bigger industrial footprint in North America.

Reinhard Hübner is, underneath the deal-making, a treatment guy with a soft spot for the unglamorous problems. He stays emotionally attached to leakage, the boring business of stopping clean water from dribbling out of broken pipes, because from an impact point of view it matters enormously, and when he is asked to name people worth watching he points to founders like Victoria Edwards of Fido rather than to himself. For an investor who insists he never meant to be one, that is the giveaway: he is in water because, as Klatten asked him at the start, the real question is whether you made more money out of money or did something that your grandchildren would call meaningful.

“First of all, I'm not an investor. My background is operations. So water is an accident in my life.”

That accident has since turned into one of the most active buy-and-build machines in the global water industry, and a useful reminder that you can read the whole sector through the people who quietly own large parts of it on my Leviathan database.