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Private equity group Advent International has agreed to buy industrial company Spectris in a £4.4bn deal, marking one of the biggest recent takeovers of a London-listed business.
Under the deal announced on Monday, shareholders in the precision measurement instruments maker will receive £37.63 per share in cash, including an interim dividend of 28p, which Spectris said its board was unanimously recommending as “fair and reasonable”.
The offer represents a premium of almost 85 per cent to the company’s share price on June 6, before Advent’s interest first emerged, and heralds the latest delisting of a UK-listed company, as buyers have taken advantage of relatively cheap valuations.
Spectris, a member of the mid-cap FTSE 250, provides high-tech instruments to companies in industries including pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. It reported sales of £299mn in the first quarter, a decline from the same period last year amid weakness in markets including automotive, chips and materials.
Advent’s offer values the group’s equity at about £3.8bn and gives it an enterprise value of £4.4bn, including debt. Shares in the group surged 15 per cent in morning trading on Monday. Shonnel Malani, managing partner at Advent, said the deal demonstrated “Advent’s vote of confidence in British engineering and innovation”.
The deal follows other recent take-private deals for UK companies including DoorDash’s £2.9bn swoop for Deliveroo, EQT’s acquisition of Keywords Studios and Thoma Bravo’s takeover of Darktrace.
The flurry of takeovers comes as the UK is battling a steady stream of large public companies shifting their primary listings from London to New York, and a sluggish market for initial public offerings.
Spectris said earlier this month it had rejected a “preliminary proposal” from private equity group KKR in favour of continuing discussions with Advent.
On Monday KKR said it had been “engaging constructively” with Spectris, adding that while it had not made a new offer, it was in advanced stages of due diligence, and may still do so.
The private equity group was also outdone by Primary Health Properties on Monday in a bidding war to acquire NHS landlord Assura. The London-listed real estate group said it was now recommending a sweetened offer from PHP valuing it at about £1.79bn, having previously recommended a “best and final” deal from KKR and US infrastructure investor Stonepeak.
The KKR-led consortium agreed a £1.7bn deal for the property business earlier in June, only for the plan to be hit by opposition from some of the FTSE 250 group’s biggest shareholders, some of which expressed their concern about the landlord being taken off London’s stock exchange at a low price.