Transportation lighting and safety company Clarience Technologies added Safe Fleet as its 11th brand in an acquisition from Oak Hill Capital. Terms were not disclosed.
Clarience said the acquisition will enable it to expand its reach in the school transportation market as well as strengthen its position in transit, fire and emergency, law enforcement, waste, and industrial and recreational vehicles.
Other Clarience brands include LED lighting systems manufacturer Truck-lite, which supplies exterior lights for Freightliner chassis as well as taillights and turn lights for school buses. Clarience also owns Davco water-fuel separators that are used in school bus diesel engines as well as Ecco backup alarms and PSI tire pressure monitoring systems.
Mark Johnson, Clarience’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, told School Transportation News that existing Safe Fleet customers can expect business as usual.
“Long term, I think there’s opportunity as you start bringing these different technologies across from Safe Fleet and from the other Clarience companies and start connecting them and start creating streamlined safety solutions or platforms for certain industries,” he continued. “Near midterm, it’s business as usual. This is a strong business with strong brands, great relationships, and great products. We intend to help them grow and flourish.”
Johnson added that the acquisition makes sense for Clarience because the company shares with Safe Fleet a common vision of achieving safety through technology, albeit with a different focus.
“We saw product lines that didn’t overlap. They really fit together,” Johnson added in terms of Safe Fleet’s solutions that range from video cameras to roof hatches, stop arms to routing software.
He said Safe Fleet’s Predictive Stop Arm also lends to the attractiveness of the deal.
“By bringing the companies together, it’s going to help us accelerate the next-generation technologies …,” Johnson commented. “… [T]hings like artificial intelligence and other more bleeding-edge technologies, it’s going to require the suppliers in this market to make investments in that. With size [and] with scale, we’re going be able to make more substantive investments that can be amortized across all the businesses.”
Safe Fleet serves over 300,000 vehicles and has more than 1,600 employees across 14 locations in North America. Clarience now grows to over 4,000 employees and 50 locations worldwide, serving customers in more than 100 countries.
“We look forward to leveraging Clarience’s global reach, resources and expertise to accelerate our growth and deliver more value to our customers,” said Safe Fleet CEO John Knox in a statement.
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