Another FTSE 100 firm falls to private equity. Where are the new listings? | Nils Pratley

It would be a stretch to describe the £10bn-ish takeover of Intertek as a landmark event for the London stock market or the FTSE 100 index. This is not an Arm Holdings moment – the purchase of that Cambridge chip designer by Japan’s SoftBank in 2016 provoked long (and continuing) agonising over the lack of whizzy tech stocks on the London market. Intertek operates in the duller world of product testing and quality inspection, so there was little wailing when the directors on Thursday did what they had signalled they would do a few weeks ago and recommended the fourth offer from a consortium led by the Swedish private equity firm EQT. But the ordinariness is still depressing for several reasons. The first is the sense of inevitability. As soon as EQT banged on the door in April, one knew how this tale was likely to go. The defending board would call the bidder’s opening offers derisory (which they were) and then the real haggling would begin. So it has proved. The bids progressed in stages from £51.50 a share to £60, the level City analysts predicted at the outset would be hard to resist. Second, the Intertek board’s capitulation is probably rational. There was a brief mention of an alternative go-it-alone strategy of a breakup, and a listing on the consumer-related operations in the US. But Intertek’s chief executive, André Lacroix, would have been better to raise such ideas two years ago, rather than when a bidder was prowling. …