By Scott Wright
AGGREKO, the Scottish-based temporary power specialist, has made its first major acquisition since returning to private hands.
The company, which was acquired by private equity outfits TDR and I Squared for £2.3 billion last year, has agreed a £123 million deal to buy Crestchic, a manufacturer of load banks for testing electricity generators. Shares in Crestchic rose sharply, closing up by nearly 11 per cent. Aggreko’s 401p per share offer represents a premium of around 44% to the Crestchic closing price of 279p on November 15 – the last business day before the offer was received.
The deal is the first fruits of a strategy being pursued by Aggreko, which continues to have a major facility at Lomondgate in Dumbarton, to add new capabilities through mergers and acquisitions under its new owners.
Aggreko said it has a complementary product offering to Creshtchic’s and declared the acquisition would accelerate its plans in high-growth end-markets such as renewable energy and data centres.
The Crestchic board noted that “as a relatively small business, could accelerate its growth and shareholder value creation by combining with a significantly larger player in related global markets”.
The directors of Crestchic intend to unanimously recommend the offer to the company’s shareholders.
Aggreko chairman Mike Smith said: “Crestchic is a world-class business operating in an attractive and specialised area of the power reliability market. In Aggreko, Crestchic will have a supportive and well-capitalised owner who shares Crestchic’s desire to execute against its long-term vision of providing solutions aligned with the changing requirements of our customers. We look forward to Crestchic becoming part of the Aggreko Group to provide the best platform for success for Crestchic’s customers, employees and wider stakeholders.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here