EQT agrees to buy Intertek in £10.9 billion deal

EQT has agreed to buy Intertek for £10.9 billion including debt, betting that one of Britain’s best-known testing and certification groups can keep delivering steady cash flow even as public markets undervalue mature industrial services businesses. The Swedish private equity firm will pay £60 a share in cash, plus up to 107.7 pence a share in potential final dividend value, a price that lifts the equity valuation to about £9.5 billion.

The attraction is not hard to see. Intertek sits inside the machinery of global commerce: 1,000 locations in more than 100 countries, checking products, verifying quality and helping companies meet safety and regulatory rules before goods move through supply chains. That makes the business less cyclical than a typical manufacturer and more like an infrastructure-style services platform, with demand tied to compliance, not consumer sentiment.

Intertek’s own numbers show why bidders were willing to pay up. The company reported 2025 revenue of £3.4316 billion, adjusted operating profit of £619.6 million and an 18.1% adjusted operating margin. Adjusted earnings per share rose 10.1% at constant currency, and the company said it was targeting mid-single-digit like-for-like revenue growth, further margin progression and strong cash generation in 2026. For EQT, that profile offers a combination of resilience and leverage capacity that private equity likes: predictable earnings, limited need for heavy industrial capital spending and room to finance a large take-private transaction.

The offer caps months of negotiation. Intertek’s board said on 12 May that it had received a final conditional proposal and remained highly confident in its standalone strategy and the value-creation opportunity from the strategic review it launched on 14 April. Three earlier approaches were turned away before the final bid, while investor pressure added to the momentum behind talks. The UK Takeover Panel later extended EQT’s deadline to 18 June, and the two sides reached agreement on that day.

Intertek’s long history helps explain why it has become such a coveted asset. The company says its roots go back more than 140 years, to Caleb Brett’s marine surveying business founded in 1885, Milton Hersey’s chemical testing laboratory in Montreal in 1888 and the Lamp Testing Bureau established in the United States in 1896. Those early businesses fed into Intertek Testing Services in the 1990s and, later, a global listed company whose value lies in trust, standards and the cost of failing a test.

The deal also underlines how far private equity is willing to go for large, cash-generative UK companies with global reach. Debt financing for the acquisition is expected to exceed £5 billion, reinforcing the view that lenders see the business as durable enough to support a leveraged buyout. If completed, the purchase would rank as the third-largest private equity takeover in UK history, a sign that even in London’s subdued market, premium assets with recurring industrial demand still command a major price.