Japan's J-Star acquires waste management business

The seller is NEC Corporation, an IT and electronics conglomerate, and a longstanding customer of Sincere. It marks a second carve-out in two months by J-Star, following the purchase of restaurant chain Pepper Lunch from parent company Pepper Food Service in July. NEC has divested a number of non-core businesses to private equity in recent years, including Nippon Avionics.

Founded in 1969, Sincere offers a range of recycling and building maintenance services in the Tokyo area, including waste power generation and transforming waste into roadbed materials. The company is said to have recorded sales of JPY13.7 billion and EBITDA of JPY3.7 billion during the 2020 financial year.

J-Star noted in a statement that the company’s increasing environmental focus allows it to play an important role in “difficult-to-replace social infrastructure.” This is the firm’s sixth transaction in the environmental services industry to date. It became a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment in 2014.

J-Star is investing via its fourth middle-market fund, which closed last year at the hard cap of JPY48.5 billion ($459 million) and typically deploys in a range of JPY1-3 billion. The firm told AVCJ last year that it expects to realize more carve-out transactions in the near term as Japan’s corporate divestment activity increasingly shifts from the large-cap space into the lower middle market.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• North Asia
• Buyouts
• Industrials
• Cleantech
• Japan
• J-Star