Antares Vision snaps up assets of liquidated Adents

Italy’s Antares Vision has won a tender to purchase the assets of French traceability and serialisation vendor Adents, which is currently in liquidation.

According to Antares, the acquisition will expand its portfolio of software and cloud services for end-to-end traceability, particularly for medicines traceability, and will increase its international presence in Europe – particularly France, UK, Ireland, Sweden – and the US.

The Travagliato-headquartered company says it is paying around €1.5m ($1.77m) in cash for the assets. Some of Adents staff will transfer to the new owner, according to Antares.

Adents built a business around a traceability and serialisation platform for the management and exchange of data between companies and regulatory authorities, so-called level 5 or network serialisation.

The platform allows distributors, contract manufacturing organisations, third-party logistics providers, hospitals and pharmacies) to comply with medicines traceability regulations, such as the Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) in Europe and the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) in the US.

Adents was unable to stay afloat despite a booming market for pharma track-and-trace systems driven by new legislative requirements over the last few years.

The company also provides cloud services – both single-tenant and multi-tenant – to customers mainly in the pharmaceutical sector, as well as some clients in food, beverage (including champagne) and luxury goods.

“We are very satisfied with this operation which will allow us to continue to strengthen our strategy and to implement a complete, digital and scalable solution for the supply chain traceability,” said Emidio Zorzella, Antares’ cjariman and chief executive.

“The operation is particularly strategic in terms of acquiring new software solutions, new skills, strengthening the geographical presence and expanding into new industries,” he added.

“The expertise in traceability for beverage will allow us to accelerate our diversification in new industries, as in the champagne segment.”

Antares posted  revenues of more than €58m in the first six months of the year, fractionally lower than the same period of 2019, with the impact of the pandemic offset by the acquisition of bottling control and inspection specialist FT Systems in 2019.

It has been on an expansion drive in the last couple of years, also buying Croatian pharmaceutical tracking software company Tradeticity in April for just over €1m, as well as Italian automated inspection company Convel in June for €12.5m, and has also opened its first operation in China.