Krystal Growth Partners (“Krystal”) is pleased to announce the sale of Carmanah Technologies Corp. (“Carmanah”), a leader in away-from-intersection solar LED pedestrian and traffic safety technology, to Vance Street Capital (“Vance Street”) effective April 28th , 2022. Carmanah will join Polara Enterprises in Vance Street’s traffic and pedestrian safety ITS platform.
Based in Victoria, BC, Carmanah is a leading designer and manufacturer of compliant solar and AC powered systems for pedestrian and traffic safety across North America. Since 1999, Carmanah has developed innovative, MUTCD-compliant " away from the intersection" safety solutions that offer cost savings while ensuring environmental sensitivities. Carmanah designs systems for a variety of applications including mid-block crosswalks, school zones, traffic-calming and general hazard marking.
The sale of Carmanah to Vance Street represents a successful conclusion to Krystal’s 9-year partnership, which began in 2013 when Carmanah was a TSE listed public company. Carmanah’s core business had been its lighting solutions for marine navigational aids, designing and manufacturing highly robust and effective products for the global marine industry. By 2013, Carmanah had expanded into a number of adjacent businesses split into three segments: Signals, Illumination and Power. The Signals segment included traffic, marine, aviation and obstruction, and later adding offshore wind. The Illumination segment included the Company’s outdoor lighting products and the Power segment included both on-grid and off-grid solar power generation.
Although loosely connected through their utilization of solar, LED lighting and/or power management, these business segments were sufficiently different to cause management to go through a rationalization process, initially selling off the Power segment and then in January 2019 selling its Signals segment, excluding offshore wind and traffic, to SPX Corp. for USD $77 million. In addition to the cash, Carmanah was left with its offshore wind business, the traffic business and SOL, Inc., its solar outdoor lighting business. At the time, these businesses were small and didn’t support being public, so in July 2019, Krystal together with Trimin Capital Corp. and CEO John Simmons took Carmanah private. Since then, Carmanah has sold SOL, spun out its offshore wind business into a separate company, Sedna Wind Technologies, and with this latest sale, sold the remaining Traffic business to Vance Street Capital.
High praise goes to John Simmons, who in 2013, as the new CEO of Carmanah, took a public company struggling to be profitable to profitability within one quarter and then through multiple divestures, generated significant returns for its shareholders and to Geoff Wilcox, who joined Carmanah in 2013 and became its President & CEO in 2019, delivering exceptional growth to the Traffic business which drove this very successful sale to Vance Street. Krystal Growth Partners is very fortunate to have worked with such great partners.