The mood among German entrepreneurs is on the rise

The change of govern­ment and the announce­ment of the package alone seem to have actually lifted the gene­ral mood after a very subdued 2024. Although many in cycli­cal sectors in parti­cu­lar are still strugg­ling with a number of cons­truc­tion sites and the coali­tion has not yet made it comple­tely clear where things should go in many areas, SMEs in parti­cu­lar, as we perceive it in the discus­sions, are expe­ri­en­cing rene­wed optimism. 

In our opinion, this is also stimu­la­ting the invest­ment busi­ness — more and more relia­ble part­ners are being sought for new growth ambi­ti­ons and, due to the ongo­ing succes­sion problems in many places, there is a far grea­ter open­ness to working with invest­ment compa­nies than in the past two years.

It is no secret that the topics of defense and infra­struc­ture are curr­ently being hyped. Of course, this also has to do with the plan­ned govern­ment spen­ding. But we also think that the deve­lo­p­ment of craft­sman plat­forms and the areas of auto­ma­tion and mecha­ni­cal engi­nee­ring offer a lot of poten­tial due to the further deve­lo­p­ment of AI and robo­tics. At VREP, the deal flow has picked up stron­gly after a very weak Q1 and we are in seve­ral promi­sing due dili­gen­ces at the same time. 

We concen­trate on areas where we alre­ady have exten­sive market and sector exper­tise and are ther­e­fore best able to support compa­nies. In the future, we want to deepen this even further and iden­tify focus areas that stand out from our still broad invest­ment focus on SMEs in ‘tradi­tio­nal’ sectors. One of these will be refri­ge­ra­tion and air condi­tio­ning tech­no­logy, where we have gained exten­sive exper­tise in plat­form deve­lo­p­ment through our invest­ments in Kälte Eckert and Zimmer & Hälbig, among others. 

What we have obser­ved is that the mezza­nine instru­ment has been forgot­ten by many entre­pre­neurs and finan­cial mana­gers during the years of low inte­rest rates, when the finan­cing envi­ron­ment was extre­mely good. In our opinion, this has now chan­ged signi­fi­cantly. As a result, even good compa­nies in diffi­cult sectors are some­ti­mes no longer able to obtain the finan­cing they need. In such situa­tions, plan­ning an addi­tio­nal acqui­si­tion mezza­nine tran­che can make tran­sac­tions feasi­ble in the first place. 

Chris­tian Futter­lieb is Mana­ging Part­ner and Mana­ging Direc­tor at the Frank­furt-based invest­ment company VR Equi­typ­art­ner. In this role, he is respon­si­ble for deal sourcing and invest­ments in medium-sized compa­nies as well as marke­ting. He began his career at VR Equi­typ­art­ner in 2006 as an invest­ment mana­ger at the prede­ces­sor company DZ Equity Part­ner. In 2008 he became a member of the Execu­tive Board, in 2013 Gene­ral Mana­ger and in 2014 Mana­ging Direc­tor.

Before joining VR Equi­typ­art­ner, he worked as a project mana­ger and autho­ri­zed signa­tory in the tran­sac­tion consul­ting divi­sion of Price­wa­ter­hous­e­Coo­pers (PwC), advi­sing inter­na­tio­nal clients. Chris­tian Futter­lieb studied busi­ness admi­nis­tra­tion at the Univer­sity of Mannheim.

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