Investors continue to pour money into U.S. cold chain infrastructure for grocery, healthcare, and life sciences, as Copeland—a provider of compression technologies and controls solutions—said it has acquired Dickson, a Chicago-based provider of environmental monitoring and compliance technology solutions.
More precisely, Copeland provides heating, cooling and refrigeration compression technologies and controls solutions for commercial, industrial, cold chain and residential end markets. Dickson provides environmental monitoring solutions for pharmaceutical, life sciences, research, biotech, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the deal involved some heavy hitters in the world of finance, since Copeland is owned by private equity giant Blackstone and Dickson had been owned by May River Capital, a Chicago-based private equity firm.
May River first acquired Dickson in 2018, and says that it has since transformed the business from a family-owned, single-site operation into a global environmental monitoring platform serving customers in more than 50 countries from its operations in Addison, Illinois, Montpellier, France and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Investors have been attracted to supply chain operations in the highly regulated life sciences and pharmaceutical application sectors, which typically offer more lucrative margins than consumer packaged goods (CPG).
For its part, Blackstone had bought a 60% ownership stake in Copeland in 2023 for $9.7 billion and bought the remaining shares in 2024 for $3.5 billion.
