Trescal Acquisitions: What It Buys and What It Pays

Trescal, the calibration group owned by EQT Infrastructure, has bought 94 businesses we can identify since 2015, nearly all of them calibration labs, in 26 countries.

In 2021, the only year for which its filed accounts give a figure, Trescal paid at least 7.6x EBITDA for the businesses it bought, taken together. That is close to the 8.0x median for testing, inspection and certification (TIC) deals under $50M (21 deals). The 9.9x median for TIC deals of every size (54 deals) includes far larger companies.

That year 90% of the price was paid in cash and 9% as earn-outs, payments due later that depend on how the business performs. The open questions for a seller are the earn-out and any shares kept back, which Trescal can agree to buy later. In North America several calibration groups also buy labs; elsewhere Trescal has few rivals.

Trescal Companies and Owners

Guillaume Caroit, the chief executive, joined Trescal in 2007 to run acquisitions. He told Mergermarket in January 2023 that a four-person M&A team in Paris handles the deals and that country managers bring it the targets.

Trescal is run from Paris and has more than 7,000 employees in 34 countries and, by its owner’s count, over 380 sites. The group’s parent company in France reported revenue of $612M (EUR 567M) for 2024 in the French company register.

Private equity has owned Trescal for more than a decade. Ardian took control in 2013 and sold to OMERS Private Equity, part of a Canadian pension plan, in 2018, and EQT Infrastructure, part of the investment firm EQT, has held a majority since 2023. OMERS reinvested for about a quarter when EQT’s deal was signed in 2022, and managers also hold shares.

How Many Companies Trescal Acquires, and What Size

Trescal bought between 8 and 16 businesses a year from 2021 to 2025.

The labs it buys are small, averaging about $4.5M (EUR 4M) of sales in 2024 and 2025 by Trescal’s own figures. In the same Mergermarket interview its chief executive said it targets mainly firms with about $1M to $13M (EUR 1M to 12M) of revenue.

What Trescal Buys and Where

By our classification, 77 of Trescal’s purchases are general calibration labs, working in the lab and on site across electrical, dimensional, pressure, temperature and mass measurement. Most of the rest are specialists in radio-frequency equipment, flow meters, weighing systems, 3D measuring machines or life-science qualification, the testing and paperwork that show a drug maker’s cleanrooms and equipment meet its regulator’s rules. Five of the 94 were calibration units carved out of larger companies.

What Trescal Pays: Acquisition Multiples

Buyers price a business as a multiple of its EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization), adjusted for one-off costs and the owner’s own pay. At 8x, a lab with $1M of EBITDA is valued at $8M. That is its enterprise value (EV), the value of the whole business, from which the owner repays any debt and keeps the rest.

The Trescal price we can stand behind is one total for 2021, in its parent company’s consolidated accounts. They put the businesses Trescal bought that year at $131M (EUR 111.4M), earn-outs included. Had Trescal owned them all year, they would have earned $17.4M (EUR 14.7M) of EBITDA on $58M (EUR 49.2M) of revenue, so it paid at least 7.6x EBITDA and 2.3x revenue for the year’s purchases.

Three quarters of the price went on purchases in Asia-Pacific, among them a Korean lab whose employees kept shares that Trescal was to buy later. Paying for those shares adds to the price, so 7.6x is a floor. A total that leans so heavily on one region says little about a typical Trescal purchase, a lab with about $4.5M of sales.

The closer yardstick is TIC deals under $50M in our análisis de valoración TIC. Their medians are 8.0x EBITDA, close to Trescal’s floor, and 1.52x revenue. The middle half of them, leaving out the cheapest and the most expensive quarter, sold for 1.04x to 2.18x revenue.

The 2021 purchases came to 2.3x revenue, above that middle half, because together they earned close to 30% EBITDA margins that year. At a 20% margin the same 7.6x EBITDA would be about 1.5x revenue. In our judgment buyers price a calibration lab on its EBITDA, so that is the multiple to compare. What your lab would fetch depends on its margins and customers, and on who else bids.

How Trescal Structures a Deal

In 2021 Trescal paid 90% of the price in cash, 9% in earn-outs and 1% in other forms. The terms of each deal are private. Earn-outs made up about 15% of the 2021 price in Europe and 9% in Asia-Pacific; the North American purchases that year carried none. The accounts do not say how long the earn-outs ran or what they were measured on.

Where sellers or employees keep shares, Trescal can agree to buy them later. Its accounts describe these agreements as put options, which let the holder make Trescal buy the shares on dates the agreement sets. In the 2021 Korean deal the remaining shares sat in an employee share plan, and the accounts show buy-back options in Asia-Pacific that could be exercised from 2023 to 2025.

A letter of intent sets the price and main terms before the full agreement is drafted, and it usually gives the buyer a period of exclusivity. Once you sign one, Trescal is the only buyer at the table. While others are still bidding, settle how much of the price is an earn-out, what it is measured on and what any shares you keep will be worth.

Qué pasa tras el cierre

Acquired labs join a Trescal branch or country business and take the Trescal name, according to the releases we read. At least five say the founder or managers stay, and most are silent on it. We found no business that Trescal has sold since.

Trescal’s releases pitch calibration across measurement domains and sites from one supplier, so that a manufacturer with plants in several countries can send its pressure gauges and thermometers to the same group. In our judgment what a lab adds to that service, whether a country, a measurement domain or capacity near Trescal’s customers, sets what it is worth to Trescal. At least 68 of its 94 purchases were in countries where it already owned a lab, so most of what it buys fills out a network already in place.

A lab folded into an existing Trescal branch shares customers and costs with it, so its own profit gets harder to separate. If part of your price depends on that profit, the agreement has to say how it will be measured once the two are run as one.

Trescal’s Competitors: Who Else Buys Calibration Labs

Who else would bid for your lab depends largely on where it is.

In North America Trescal is one of several active buyers of calibration labs. Accredited Labs, Transcat and SGS, through Applied Technical Services, have each bought more labs there than Trescal has. An owner there has other buyers to set against Trescal.

Outside North America Trescal made 75 of the 129 calibration deals we record since 2015. The other 54 are spread among 33 buyers, none with more than eight, and Eurofins, Bureau Veritas, DEKRA, Intertek and TUV SUD bought no calibration lab in our data. So for a lab outside North America the other bidders have to be found and brought in, among them testing groups that have bought calibration before and private equity investors building a calibration business.

Answer Trescal alone and you sell at its price and on its terms.

Is This a Good Time to Sell to Trescal?

Trescal is still buying at pace, which makes this a good time to hear from it. It bought 8 to 13 labs a year from 2023 to 2025 under EQT Infrastructure, 31 in all. In Trescal’s release of 13 January 2026, its chief executive said: “We will continue this pace of global expansion, with two market entries planned for 2026.” No sale of Trescal has been reported.

A purchase can take longer where a competition regulator looks at it. In Australia, the regulator has been reviewing a proposed Trescal purchase since July 2026.

That interest is worth most when other bidders are in the room, so talk to us before you reply to Trescal, and before you put a figure in writing or sign a letter of intent. We prepare the business and approach the TIC groups and private equity investors that value your accreditations and customers most. We run a competitive process among them and other buyers with a real reason to want your lab, so you choose between the best offers and get the best price and terms, including how much is paid in cash and how much depends on an earn-out. If keeping the company is the better choice for you, we say so. Our Asesoramiento en M&A para empresas TIC explica cómo trabajamos.

Sobre Aventis Advisors

Asesoramos a propietarios en ventas con enterprise values típicos de entre 5 millones y 100 millones de dólares, como socios de la red Globalscope. También asesoramos a adquirentes habituales, y por eso sabemos cómo construyen sus ofertas y dónde dejan margen.

Transacciones recientes:

• Asesoramiento a Apave en sus adquisiciones de ISOCERT y De Duurzame Adviseurs.
• Venta de CKSource, desarrolladora del editor de texto enriquecido, a PSG a través de Tiugo Technologies, tras un proceso global que atrajo varias cartas de intenciones.
• Asesoramiento a Visma en su adquisición de SaldeoSMART.

«Nos impresionaron las dotes de negociación de Marcin y la capacidad de Aventis para hacer que las cosas sucedan.»

Sindre Talleraas Holen, director de M&A, Visma

«Aventis Advisors se encargó del trabajo pesado para que nuestro equipo directivo pudiera seguir centrado en nuestro negocio.»

Wiktor Walc, presidente, CKSource

Escríbenos a marcin.majewski@aventis-advisors.com. La primera conversación es confidencial.

Metodología

The count covers majority acquisitions by Trescal announced from 2015, each checked against Trescal’s announcement or, failing that, the seller’s advisor or the trade press. The deals come from the Aventis Advisors TIC deal database, which combines Mergermarket with acquirer announcements and other public sources such as news articles and annual reports. Each deal is counted under the group that made it at the time, and the sales of Trescal itself sit outside the count. Deals announced in Trescal’s January round-up releases count in the year each release covers. Our TIC valuation pages are built from the database before this deal-by-deal check, so they can show a slightly different count for Trescal. The table of competing buyers counts each buyer’s calibration acquisitions since 2015 with the platforms it owns today.

Trescal’s price, payment mix and buy-back commitments come from the 2021 consolidated accounts of Talbot International, its parent company, filed at Companies House with the accounts of Trescal Limited; later filings there do not include them. The multiples divide the price reported for the year’s purchases by the full-year revenue and EBITDA reported for them, and are computed on the reported euro figures (EUR 111.4M, EUR 14.7M and EUR 49.2M), not on the rounded dollar conversions. Its 2024 revenue comes from the French company register, and the sales of the companies it bought in 2024 and 2025 from its own releases.

The TIC medians come from our TIC valuation research, 2,841 deals since 2015, and use enterprise value (equity value plus net debt); we count only EBITDA multiples between 1x and 60x. Fewer deals publish EBITDA than revenue, so the two medians rest on different numbers of deals. We quote a middle-half range only where it rests on at least 10. Figures in euros are converted at the European Central Bank’s annual average rates: $1.18 per EUR 1 for 2021, $1.08 for 2023 and 2024, and $1.13 for 2025.