Halfords swoops for tyre company in £37m deal
Halfords has acquired LTC Trading Holdings and its subsidiary Lodge Tyre Company in a deal worth £37.2m.
Lodge Tyre has depots throughout the Midlands, East Anglia, North Wales and the North West and operates from 50 garages and 248 mobile vans. The firm employs over 400 people.
The deal takes the Halfords garage services business to 656 garages, 253 consumer vans, 440 commercial vans and 9 warehouses.
Graham Stapleton, chief executive officer of Halfords, said: “The acquisition of Lodge Tyre is yet another example of Halfords’ strategic aim of becoming a motoring Services-focused business, and will mean that motoring accounts for over three quarters of our total revenue. The current trading environment reinforces the rationale for building ever-more resilient, needs-based revenue streams, which is exactly what the motoring category offers. Within that, the nature of the commercial tyre market means that it is non-discretionary and therefore extremely well insulated against macroeconomic uncertainty.
“Lodge is an outstanding operation that perfectly complements our existing commercial tyre businesses of McConechy’s and Universal Tyres, and gives us a much greater reach across the UK. We were already the UK’s market-leading Motoring Service provider to consumers, and this acquisition will also make us the UK’s largest commercial tyre provider. We look forward to welcoming the Lodge team to the Halfords family.”
Ragi Singh from Gowling WLG advised Halford. He said: “It has been fantastic to work with Halfords again on another acquisition which takes them closer to achieving their stated objectives. These complex, strategic transactions play to our strengths and we are very proud to have helped Halfords complete this step towards their aim of becoming a motoring services focussed business as well as the UK’s largest B2B commercial tyre provider.”
