PEP, Landis+Gyr to acquire Australia smart meter business
Pacific Equity Partners (PEP) and Landis+Gyr, a Switzerland-based technology supplier to the electricity industry, have agreed to jointly acquire Australian smart meter company Acumen for A$267 million ($202 million).
Landis+Gyr will contribute A$75 million to the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of next month via a joint venture company known as IntelliHUB. It marks the first investment from PEP’s recently launched secure assets fund, which is targeting a corpus of up to A$1 billion for revenue-generative infrastructure projects in Australasia.
As part of the deal, the fund and a consortium of eight Australian and international banks will commit an additional A$500 million to expand Acumen’s operations across Australia. The seller, domestic power utility Origin Energy, will support this effort through an ongoing partnership that connects its electricity customers with Acumen’s smart meter technology.
"The Australian market is just commencing a major widespread deployment of smart metering technology,” Cameron Blanks, a managing director at PEP, said in a statement. “This requires experienced partners that are acutely focused on the customer experience and getting the most out of this once-in-a-generation technology refresh.”
Acumen was founded as an in-house digital metering unit of Origin in 2010. It currently manages about 170,000 smart meters across Australia. The company is expected to benefit from a parallel arrangement between IntelliHUB and Landis+Gyr that aims to deploy about 800,000 smart meters to multiple utility clients across Australia and New Zealand in a five-year period.
According to Landis+Gyr, about eight million smart meters are expected to be installed by various industry players in the near term across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory. The company has supplied more than two million of the 2.9 million smart meters currently deployed in Victoria.
PEP is Australia’s largest domestic buyout player. The GP has raised five buyout funds since 1998 in addition to the secure assets fund, the latest of which closed at a hard cap of A$2.1 billion in 2015. Previous activity in the energy space includes the acquisition of an 80% stake in Australian power plant services provider Energy Developments for $316 million in 2010.
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