Скачать или смотреть Jean-Baptiste Wautier on turning cow tags into a 1.5 billion exit

Great investors learn to love moats, respect culture and fear liquidity risk.

In this exchange, Jean-Baptiste Wautier walks Thomas through two investments that crystallised his matrix: Allflex and Pronovias.

Allflex was the kind of business most people overlook: factories producing plastic ear tags for cattle, touching 500 million calves at birth every year. But beneath the simplicity was a fortress. Global market share, thick margins, and a moat built from scale, distribution and regulation. JBW saw the optionality hiding in plain sight: shift from plastic to chips, add DNA collection, and build a data layer that could predict disease, elevate farm productivity and expose ineffective vaccines 🧬

That meant rewiring an analog manufacturer into a digital animal-intelligence platform. Culture, organisation, R&D - everything had to move. Six years later, the transformation was complete. Bought at 13x EBITDA and sold to Merck at 24x EBITDA, generating a 1.5 billion capital gain. Optionality wasn’t theoretical.

Pronovias, the downside case, looked equally strong on paper: iconic brand, low price elasticity, global footprint, steady demand. Then COVID froze weddings for 18 months. Inventory piled up, retailers stalled, cash evaporated 💸

But the deeper issue was cultural. A founder-led, autocratic structure resisted the shift to a professionalised management model, making the crisis twice as hard to navigate. The macro shock was unpredictable; the liquidity strain and cultural friction were not.

"The system can stop. So you need moats, a culture you can actually shift, and enough liquidity to survive when it does."

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