Avantor Performance Materials

About Avantor Performance Materials

The story of Avantor begins not with a grand vision, but with a simple problem of a college student. In 1904, John Townsend Baker, a chemistry student at Lafayette College, grew frustrated with the impurity of lab chemicals, which he realized were compromising the accuracy of his results. Taking matters into his own hands, he founded the J.T. Baker Chemical Company to produce chemicals with the "highest degree of purity commercially possible." This commitment to quality was innovative at the time; the company was the first to include labels that listed detailed analyses of trace impurities on its products. Over the decades, the J.T. Baker company changed hands multiple times, being acquired by companies like Procter & Gamble and eventually Mallinckrodt. A pivotal chapter began in 2010 when the private equity firm New Mountain Capital purchased Mallinckrodt Baker for approximately $280 million and renamed the company Avantor Performance Materials. This move marked a strategic shift towards global growth and a focus on high-purity materials for life sciences and advanced technologies. Under New Mountain Capital's ownership, Avantor grew significantly through strategic acquisitions, including a transformative one in 2017 when it acquired VWR, a major global provider of laboratory products and services, for approximately $6.5 billion. This deal created a vertically integrated company and a powerful end-to-end partner for customers from discovery to delivery. The journey culminated in May 2019, when Avantor went public on the New York Stock Exchange with a major initial public offering, raising around $3.8 billion. From a student's quest for purity, the company had evolved into a publicly traded, global leader in the life sciences industry.