Mon, 11 Mar 2024 | BUSINESS SALE
Elite KL, a West Midlands-based specialist thermal management business, has been acquired by a private equity syndicate. The company provides specialist services, including heating, ventilation, air conditioning and electric vehicle battery thermal management for customers in the automotive, rail and construction sectors.
The company operates from a 40,000 sq ft facility in Tamworth and is involved in all stages of the value chain, from design and validation to supply and aftercare. In its most recent accounts, for the year to December 31 2022, the company reported turnover of £9.4 million, up from £8.1 million a year earlier, but saw its operating profit slip from £573,818 to £133,454.
At the time, the company said that profits had been hit by increased spending on security (during March 2021, the company’s Tamworth site was taken over by protesters from Palestine Action who chained the gates shut and gained access to the factory roof), and rising supply chain costs.
Despite this, the company was still able to increase turnover and report an operating profit in line with the expectations of management and said that it “moves into 2023 with a healthy order book and more than adequate liquidity.”
The company has now been acquired in a deal funded by Maven Capital Partners and Ethos Partners. A spokesperson for Elite KL said that the company was seeing “an exciting period of growth”.
They continued: "The West Midlands manufacturing industry has long been an area of high value to the UK economy, employing over 310,000 people, and our ambitious expansion strategy will ensure this remains the case.”
"Our management team has a proven track record of servicing global clients, and we look forward to translating this success across the broader rail and automotive sectors, as we expand into key European markets."
According to recent research from BDO and Make UK, acquisitive sentiment is high in the UK manufacturing sector, despite activity having been hit by recent economic uncertainty. Private equity is set to play a major role in the sector’s dealmaking, with 16 per cent of deals completed in 2023 involving private equity and 20 per cent of UK manufacturers saying they were likely to seek PE funding over the next one to five years.
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