AddLife AB, the Stockholm-listed life-science group, has acquired Unicam Sistemas Analíticos Lda, a Portuguese distributor of advanced analytical laboratory equipment, the company announced on 9 September. The deal closed on 8 September. Unicam has annual revenue of approximately €10 million and 20 employees, and will be folded into AddLife’s Labtech business area while continuing to trade under its own name. AddLife expects a marginal positive effect on earnings per share this financial year. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Unicam has operated since 1991 and sells instruments, consumables, technical support, service and training in three fields: chromatography, spectrometry and microwave technology. Its customers are universities, research institutes and industrial laboratories across Portugal. The company is based in Miraflores, Algés, on the western edge of Lisbon, with a second office and technical-service base in Maia, outside Porto, and is certified to ISO 9001:2015. According to its own website, Unicam is the sole representative in Portugal for the chromatography, spectrometry and molecular-spectroscopy divisions of Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Thermo Scientific brand — the Dionex ion-chromatography, Orbitrap mass-spectrometry and ICP-MS lines among them — and it also carries Milestone’s microwave digestion, extraction and synthesis systems.

Instruments plus consumables plus service

That mix is exactly what AddLife says it is shopping for. “Unicam has built a strong market position in Portugal, combining deep specialist expertise with long-standing customer relationships in chromatography, spectrometry, and microwave technologies. This is fully aligned with our strategy of acquiring advanced laboratory instrument companies that also sell consumables and provide services,” said Mattias Bengtsson, AddLife’s Vice President for BioMedical & Research, the Labtech unit that will house the company. Unicam’s general manager, Daniel Ettlin, called the sale “an exciting new chapter” that gives the business “the support of a long-term owner” within a decentralised model that “provides both freedom and opportunity.”

The decentralisation is real rather than rhetorical. AddLife runs about 85 operating subsidiaries with 2,300 employees and net sales above SEK 10 billion (roughly €900 million), each subsidiary keeping its brand, management and supplier relationships. The group was carved out of Addtech’s life-science division in 2015, listed on Nasdaq Stockholm on 16 March 2016, and marked ten years as an independent company this spring. By 2024 more than half of its sales came from outside the Nordic region, the result of a decade of bolt-on deals across Central and Eastern Europe, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy and Iberia. Its second-quarter report, published on 16 July, showed net sales of SEK 2,721 million, up 6 percent, and EBITA of SEK 342 million at a 12.6 percent margin, with organic growth of 4 percent and CEO Fredrik Dalborg noting that the group was “actively pursuing further acquisitions.” Unicam is the third announced this year, after the UK urology distributor BioSpectrum in the first quarter and Austria’s CoaChrom Diagnostica in the second.

Iberia, built from Spain, now anchored in Portugal

AddLife’s Iberian presence has until now run through Spain. Its Medtech business area added MBA, a Spanish orthopaedics distributor, in 2022. On the Labtech side it bought BonsaiLab in July 2024 — a genomics and molecular-biology distributor headquartered in Alcobendas, outside Madrid, with €8 million in revenue, 13 staff and, in AddLife’s words at the time, “operations in Spain and Portugal.” Unicam gives the same Biomedical & Research unit a Portuguese-headquartered company with its own service engineers in Lisbon and Porto and an installed base in the country’s university and industrial laboratories. The combination is a familiar AddLife pattern: a Spanish specialist covering Iberia from Madrid, then a local acquisition once the Portuguese market is large enough to justify one, and the two left to run independently.

For Thermo Fisher, whose Portuguese chromatography and spectrometry sales have gone through Unicam for years, the change of ownership brings a Nordic-owned channel partner with deeper pockets and a European service network, without changing the people on the ground. For Portuguese laboratories, the relevant question is whether AddLife’s purchasing scale and group-wide supplier agreements translate into a broader catalogue at Unicam — AddLife’s Labtech subsidiaries in about 30 European countries distribute diagnostics, research and analysis products from a long list of premium suppliers, and the group actively matches new suppliers to its local companies.

Why it matters for the corridor

The deal is small by AddLife’s standards and large by the standards of the Portugal–Sweden corridor, where the recurring transaction of 2026 has been precisely this: a listed Swedish group with a decentralised model buying a profitable, owner-managed Portuguese specialist with a defensible niche and sales in the tens of millions of euros or less. ASSA ABLOY’s purchase of the Águeda lock maker Santos in July, Nordrest’s move into the Castelo Branco rations producer Albisabores the same month, and Autocirc’s acquisition of the auto recycler SVP Auto in January followed the same script. Life science is a natural next sector for it. Portugal’s laboratory-equipment market is served largely by exclusive national distributors for the big instrument brands, many of them owner-managed — the profile that AddLife, and Swedish serial acquirers like it, have spent a decade buying across Europe. Unicam will not be the last Portuguese distributor to get a call from Stockholm.