As announced today, the Austrian based leading refrigeration specialist AHT Cooling Systems has purchased the UK company Caravell as part of AHT’s growth strategy.    

AHT, a major player in the commercial refrigeration market, will integrate Caravell with its €23 million turnover into its existing AHT UK company. This purchase makes AHT confident it can gain major synergies in selling its renowned product portfolio via the existing Caravell sales network and fits the AHT plan to double its business turnover in the next five years.

 All existing Caravell product lines will be re-branded AHT. The brand name Caravell will be dropped as AHT wants to indicate and underline that AHT as a brand name is the future of the company and builds on its international success. Furthermore, the Scanfrost brand will be found as the value for money range portfolio and will be used on all the products not manufactured by AHT. 

The Caravell management team, led by John Lougher, will work alongside with the current head of the existing AHT Team, Stephen Burke; Hans Jensen, the previous chairman of Caravell UK will take up a new role, working on a global basis for AHT’s worldwide business. In the near future the whole team will work in the former Caravell office building in Buckingham, which will be re-branded to the AHT corporate design in the next few weeks.

 In the future AHT’s UK business will have two divisions: The supermarket division will manage chest freezers and will be run by Stephen Burke and his team, all other products such as bottle coolers, ice cream freezers etc. will be handled by John Lougher and his team.

The CEO of AHT, Hans Jörgensen, looks forward to a successful future and believes the outlook for AHT in the UK to be very positive: “With this purchase AHT will get in a position to grow its UK business at a faster rate - which will contribute to the AHT target of doubling the size of the company within five years.”