Shyness is a thing of the past: the willingness of family-owned businesses and medium-sized companies to work with private equity firms has increased noticeably in recent years. This observation was unanimously shared by the participants of the SME panel at the Börsen-Zeitung's Private Markets Week 2025. Timo Tauber, Managing Director of Viessmann Industries Holding, spoke in this context of a new openness among the younger generation of owners. For example, the Viessmann family entered into a strategic partnership with KKR to acquire the wind farm operator Encavis.

But even beyond prominent collaborations such as Viessmann and KKR, there is a fundamental rapprochement between SMEs and private equity, with the Covid-19 pandemic even acting as an accelerator. Tom Alzin, Spokesman of the Executive Board of Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (DBAG), sees the desire to diversify portfolios as the main reason for this. Many family-owned companies realised that their money was tied up in one asset and were therefore open to adjustments through transactions.

From the perspective of investment companies, it is not only traditional SMEs that are attractive; there are also, as Alzin calls them, „new success stories“. As an example, he points to the tutoring chain Schülerhilfe, which now has 3,000 locations. Companies operating in niche sectors where precision and employee training play such an important role that the quality of the products and services justifies higher wage costs are of particular interest. In contrast, Viessmann Industries Holding representative Tauber pointed out that companies whose products and services are becoming „commodities“ and are therefore forced into a barely sustainable competition with large corporations on the basis of scale must ask themselves fundamental questions.

Tauber drew attention to investments in technologies whose long-term demand base is intact and will therefore definitely be needed in the long term, such as cooling technology in times of climate change. If the long-term demand for a company's products and services is secure, the investment does not necessarily have to deliver a return from day one.

Prof. Gerd Merke, Head of Capital Investment at Euroroc, the European and International Natural Stone Industry Association, confirmed that, in his opinion, there are also enough attractive medium-sized companies in Germany. Small and medium-sized enterprises in this country remain competitive. However, he found it worrying that small and medium-sized enterprises had recently increased their administrative staff more than their production staff in order to cope with regulatory requirements. Furthermore, he said that the situation in France showed how difficult it was in Europe to implement necessary adjustments to pensions or labour costs.