Renew Holdings buys high-voltage cabling specialist PBU for up to £50m
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Renew Holdings has acquired Porter Brothers Holdings, the parent company of extra high voltage cabling and directional drilling specialist PBU (UK), for up to £50 million in cash.
The AIM-listed engineering services group announced the deal on Oct. 28. It is paying £31.1 million upfront, funded from its existing banking facilities, with up to £18.9 million more due if PBU’s former owners hit specific profit targets over 3 years. Renew completed the purchase through its subsidiary Excalon Holdings, on a cash and debt free basis.
Renew based the price on sustainable earnings before interest and tax of £3.9 million and EBITDA of £5.5 million.
That split says something about how Renew values the business. Most of the money is guaranteed, but more than a third depends on PBU growing its profits after joining the group.
Renew is assembling a turnkey offer for power networks
PBU provides extra high voltage cabling and directional drilling services to the energy distribution market. Directional drilling lets contractors install cable ducts underground without digging open trenches, which matters when a route has to pass beneath roads, railways, rivers, or protected land.
The acquisition is the latest in a run of electricity network deals for Excalon Holdings. Renew lists Emerald Power, Electricity Distribution Engineering Services, and PWR-X among its recent purchases, and says the combined business can now take a client from design through every stage of delivery.
That is the strategic logic. Network operators running large capital programmes can deal with one contractor for a whole package of work, rather than coordinating a long chain of specialist subcontractors.
Renew chief executive Paul Scott said the deal adds complementary specialist capabilities to the group’s established position in the regulated energy market. He also pointed to the group’s familiarity with the target. “PBU is a company we already know very well,” he said.
The group expects the acquisition to be immediately earnings enhancing. It says its balance sheet remains strong and that it is still evaluating a pipeline of further acquisitions.
Regulated grid spending is reshaping the civils supply chain
The timing reflects where UK infrastructure money is flowing. Renew says the deal gives it access to a larger share of the roughly £50 billion to £60 billion of investment committed across the RIIO-ED2 and ET3 control periods and beyond.
RIIO is the framework Ofgem uses to set how much network companies can spend and recover through energy bills. RIIO-ED2 covers the regional electricity distribution networks and runs until March 2028. RIIO-ET3 covers electricity transmission, having started in April 2026, and runs until March 2031.
For contractors, regulated spending of this kind offers something most construction markets cannot: long-term visibility. Renew describes its markets as largely governed by regulation and backed by committed funding, and it has built its strategy around non-discretionary maintenance and renewal work.
High-voltage cabling sits close to the front of that demand. Connecting new generation, reinforcing local networks, and moving cables underground all require specialist crews and equipment that take years to build up.
Buying an established operator is one way to secure that capacity quickly. A single transaction brings trained engineers, drilling plant, and client relationships into the group at once, without the wait involved in building a new team from scratch.
The earn-out leaves the deal’s final value open
The £50 million headline figure is a ceiling, not a certainty. Whether Renew pays the full amount depends on PBU meeting its profit targets over the next 3 years, and the announcement does not disclose what those targets are.
Integration will also matter. Scott said Renew would update the market on PBU’s integration in due course, and the group now has several recently acquired power businesses to bring together under Excalon.
A wider question sits behind the deal. If network operators deliver their committed programmes on schedule, specialist capacity like PBU’s should stay in demand. If projects slip, the earn-out targets could become harder to reach.
Whether other contractors follow Renew in buying specialist power capacity, and how much they are prepared to pay for it, will become clearer as the current distribution price control approaches its end in 2028.
Source:
Renew Holdings (RNS via Investegate)
