On Monday, Swedish private equity real assets investor EQT announced that it is selling StormGEO, the Bergen, Norway-headquartered weather intelligence firm that it has owned since 2014, to Stockholm listed energy and marine materials firm Alfa Laval. In a series of official announcements from the three companies on Monday, Alfa Laval affirmed that StormGeo’s acquisition will add a key tool to its growing suite of decarbonization technologies.
The purchase price is NOK 3.63 billion (about $440 million) on a debt and cash free business. Post-acquisition, StormGEO will be integrated into Alfa Laval’s Marine Business Division.
StormGeo provides weather-centric services to more than 2,200 customers (with more than 12,000 ships) globally in a variety of industries, including shipping, energy, utilities, aviation, and onshore industries such as healthcare, hospitality, insurance and retail. The company notes that with extreme weather being the number one cause of business disruptions globally, its site-specific forecasts, coupled with asset specific data, can save fuel and resources while also improving ESG performance.
Since 2018, StormGeo says it has advanced decarbonization targets for for its shipping customers by saving 2.1 million MT fuel, thereby reducing CO2 emissions by 6.2 million MT, or the equivalent of removing 1,342,000 cars from the road for one year.
“The acquisition of StormGeo will be a strong addition to our toolbox of solutions that help our customers address the decarbonization challenge in the industry. Furthermore, StormGeo fits excellently to our digital acceleration ambition, and we will use their digital and customer experience to level up our offerings and to get deeper experience in the digital space,” said Tom Erixon, President and CEO of Alfa Laval.
“Joining Alfa Laval, a world-leading industrial owner, benefits StormGeo by developing our business through increased geographic and technological expansion,” said Søren Andersen, StormGeo CEO. “By investing even more into developing leading software and SaaS products, we enable our customers to improve efficiency and reduce their carbon emissions while keeping their people, assets and operations safe from increasingly extreme weather.”
In March of this year, StormGeo rolled out its Strategic Power Routing service, a technology solution that optimizes the power output of a vessel in variable weather conditions to enhance the vessel’s total fuel efficiency and reduce emissions without compromising arrival windows. It does this by factoring weather conditions into statistical speed loss calculated by vessel type, and generating a recommended RPM that stabilizes power and fuel consumption (rather than allowing them to spike).
The company was founded in 1997, as an offshoot of TV2, Norway’s largest commercial broadcaster. In 1993, Norway’s TV2 was the first channel to use animated weather reports. Meteorologist Siri Kalvig saw an opportunity to offer customized weather services to other industries: an idea that eventually grew into StormGeo.
