Röko is a serial acquirer.
It is a serial acquirer, initiated in 2019, led by Fredrik Karlsson, former CEO of Lifco, and other veteran investors. Fredrik had disagreements about compensation at Lifco, which led to his dismissal, so he founded his own company. The company listed on the Stockholm stock exchange last March.
Fredrik grew Lifco’s value by approximately 100-fold in 20 years, so there’s plenty of track record. Now, the lessons of the king of serial acquirers have been refined and applied to Röko, which is still tiny compared to Lifco. Lifco’s EBITA is 6 billion SEK; Röko’s is about a fifth of that.
Röko acquires companies with a historical track record (>10 years) of growth and profitability (EBITA >15%), as well as an asset-light business model. An added bonus is that they should be leaders in their niche. The selling entrepreneurial family usually continues as a minority owner, as Fredrik found this model to work best at Lifco. At Lifco, frugality and simplicity were emphasized. These are values that are reflected in the numbers, for example, in the small headcount at headquarters and a flat hierarchy.
Furthermore, Fredrik seems to believe that the numbers speak for themselves. Historical track records serve as the basis for analyzing acquisition targets. Cash flow is important as it finances new acquisitions. Growing revenue itself is laborious because it requires more staff and inventory: margins must remain good with growth. All in all, management thus has a sensible, easily understandable philosophical basis for its operations.
Management with this track record are not idiots, so Röko does not distribute dividends. Instead, all cash flow after minor investment needs is used to create a snowball effect, i.e., for new acquisitions (either platform or add-on).
Plenty of Market
In Europe, there are approximately 12 million businesses with less than 50 MEUR in revenue. Annually, an estimated 1,500 suitable companies come up for sale for Röko, out of about 15,000 small firms sold annually in Europe. The company states it is a desired owner, as who would want to sell their “child” (business) to short-sighted and utterly greedy private equity instead of such a known eternal owner. But of course, there is competition for acquisition targets, as many industrial buyers and serial acquirers are in the same hunting grounds. At the same time, the market is so large that the greater focus should be on their own strict acquisition criteria and adhering to them strictly. Growing revenue through acquisitions is one of the easiest things in the world: extracting profitable cash flow from them above the cost of capital without the whole thing falling apart is the challenge.
The company therefore has no annual acquisition targets, which could encourage buying just anything for the sake of the targets themselves.
A Mixed Bag of Profitable Companies
A risk still creeps into my mind, however, that the company has been in too much of a hurry. Röko has about 30 companies. The group is a truly mixed bag of companies. Most were acquired in 2021 and 2022. From a buyer’s perspective, those years have not exactly been the most attractive. The company’s revenue is over 6 billion SEK, operating profit over 1 billion SEK. The adjusted EBITA for the last 12 months is 1.3 billion SEK.
The company has been primarily financed from the owners’ pockets in the form of share issues. According to the Q3’25 report, the company has interest-bearing bank loans of one billion and net debt of 0.5 billion SEK, but 2.6 billion in acquisition options, once Röko eventually acquires 100% ownership. Cash is just under 500 MSEK. Net financial liabilities are approximately 3.1 billion SEK.
ROCE is 14.5% and ROE is 13%. Naturally, for an early-stage serial acquirer, things move slower, and there is less organic growth, which is why capital return figures lag behind super-peers. ROCE without intangible assets is as much as +164%! The EBITA margin hovers around 20%.
Share Valuation is Not Overpriced, But Not Cheap Either
The company listed at a price over 2000 kronor, and the share even reached 3000 kronor in the summer. Liquidity is low, and as lock-ups expire, previous financiers have apparently sold shares. At the same time, the main owner Fredrik has bought them up with both hands.
There are 14.6 million shares. This means that the company’s market capitalization is 1900 kronor times the number of shares, or approximately 28 billion SEK. EV is thus 31 billion SEK. With realized figures, EV/EBITA is therefore approximately 24x. However, part of the EBITA goes to the minority owners of the companies, so the profit attributable to shareholders is smaller, and in this sense, EV/EBITA is a somewhat misleading multiple. Roughly, the P/E ratio based on consensus estimates for 2026e is 33x.
For example, the mentioned more mature Lifco trades at EV/EBITA 30x, respectively, but as a serial acquirer, it is a phenomenal machine whose pace does not seem to slow down due to its size, nor does its quality deteriorate. Röko’s journey is, of course, still at the beginning, but Lifco’s multiples well illustrate how even a larger-scale serial acquirer can have a long runway ahead. Smaller, also very high-quality Momentum Group trades at approximately 26x EV/EBITA, and Berner Industrier, which relaunched its career as a serial acquirer, trades at 22x. Sdiptech, which grew too fast, is indebted, and somewhat problematic, wallows at an EV/EBITA level of 11x. It is worth mentioning that Röko’s other main owner, Chairman of the Board Tomas Billing, previously worked at Nordstjernan, which in turn is Momentum Group’s main owner.
A mixed group of 30 companies, generating approximately one billion kronor in cash flow annually, would not, of course, as such, be worth 30 billion in the stock market. Roughly, one could estimate that this group barely carries a value of 10-15 billion kronor (minus debt liabilities), so the remaining approximately 20 billion kronor of the company’s market value relies on future value creation in the hands of Fredrik and other management. And of course, this is a gap in financial time-space that needs to be filled to the brim so that an investor buying shares at the current price would receive a satisfactory return, considering the risks. Considering the company’s 15% long-term growth target and an excellent, committed leadership team, a P/E of 33x on next year’s estimated earnings may not necessarily be too much, but of course, in terms of safer investing, it would be delightful to get such a treat into the portfolio a bit cheaper.
Röko’s investor pages https://www.roko.se/investors
Addition. Here is a screenshot from the Q3’25 presentation of the acquired companies. Owned businesses include, for example, car spare parts trade, software sales, lubricants for conveyor belts, a bathroom product designer, or even a golf equipment retailer.
And of course, not a word about risks! 
It probably says something about the disciplined culture he had built at Lifco.
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The threads are so quiet that I don’t think every message needs to be article-length or create extreme added value 
