Private equity keeps picking off London-listed firms – and Westminster barely notices | Nils Pratley
The latest swoop – for Bodycote, another FTSE 250 industrial firm – has barely raised barely an eyebrow in Westminster The UK is the business of “reindustrialising”, says the prime minister.
If we are, an increasing portion of the activity will be under foreign ownership.
Tuesday brought yet another overseas private equity swoop on a FTSE 250 industrial firm.
This time it’s the Macclesfield-based Bodycote, which describes itself as “the world’s largest service provider of heat treatment and specialist metallurgical technologies” – think, for example, processes and coatings to toughen jet engine blades.
The buyer is the US buyout firm Veritas for £1.65bn or 940p a share, or £1.85bn including debt.
Unless, that is, the rival bidder, CVC, a European private equity firm, comes back for another bite, which the market clearly thinks is a possibility because Bodycote’s shares closed at 955p.
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5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theguardian.com — the content belongs to The Guardian Business.
