SGS Acquisitions: What It Buys and What It Pays

SGS, the Swiss-listed testing, inspection and certification (TIC) group, has bought 105 TIC firms we can identify since 2015. Working from its annual reports, we find it has paid about the market rate since 2021, 2.2 times the revenue of the businesses it bought from 2021 to 2025 against a 2.1x median for TIC deals of the same years (71 deals). Before 2021 it paid less, 1.2x revenue once its one large purchase is set aside, or 1.5x with it, against a 1.6x median.

An SGS offer is mostly cash on closing day. SGS pays in cash, and in 2025 the part of the price still owed after closing was 11%. In 93 of the 105 deals our records show it buying the whole company. Anything tied to later results, or to a share you keep, depends on the formula in the agreement and on how the business does under SGS.

SGS Companies and Divisions

SGS is based in Baar, Switzerland, and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. In 2025 it had sales of about $8.4 billion and about 101,000 full-time staff on average. Our ranking of the Top 10 Largest TIC Companies shows how it compares with its listed peers. Its largest shareholder is Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, which held 14.3% of the shares at the end of 2025, down from 19.1% a year earlier, according to SGS’s 2025 annual report. Fund managers led by UBS and BlackRock come next. Géraldine Picaud became chief executive in March 2024.

Its Testing and Inspection division holds four business lines, Industries & Environment, Natural Resources, Connectivity & Products, and Health & Nutrition. Business Assurance is its certification division.

SGS’s releases of July and October 2026 name Applied Technical Services (ATS), Brightsight, Bluesign and Nutrasource among the specialist brands that keep their own names inside the group. ATS is the newest and largest of them, a US testing and inspection group that SGS agreed to buy for $1.3 billion in July 2025 and took over in January 2026. Before it joined SGS, ATS had made 37 TIC acquisitions of its own, which we count apart from SGS’s 105.

How Many Companies SGS Acquires, and What Size

Until 2022 SGS bought about eight TIC firms a year, then only one in 2023. Buying picked up again from 2024, and 2025, with 19 acquisitions, was its busiest year in our count.

SGS’s annual reports give the price and full-year revenue of each year’s purchases, and the firms they describe are small. From 2015 to 2025 SGS paid about $19 million on average for a business with about $11 million of revenue. In 2025 the average was about $18 million. The reports stop at the end of 2025, so ATS at $1.3 billion sits outside these averages.

What SGS Buys and Where

SGS buys across the whole of testing, inspection and certification. Industrial inspection (28), environmental testing and safety services (24), and food and consumer product testing (22) make up 74 of its 105 acquisitions.

ATS’s own purchases before SGS bought it, all in the US, were mostly calibration labs (20), a trade in which SGS itself has bought two firms, and NDT and other industrial inspection firms (15).

Europe is SGS’s largest region over the whole period, by three deals, but it buys more and more in the United States. From 2015 to 2022, 17 of its 67 TIC acquisitions were American. The share rose to 17 of 37 in 2024 to 2026, ATS among them.

SGS’s 2024 plan sets a target to double its North American sales from $0.9 billion in 2023 to $1.8 billion in 2027. When it completed ATS, SGS said the deal “delivers 80% of our objective” (SGS release, 13 January 2026).

What SGS Pays: Acquisition Multiples

Buyers price a firm as a multiple of a yearly figure, usually EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, adjusted for one-off costs and the owner’s own pay) or revenue. At 8x, a firm with $2 million of EBITDA is worth $16 million, and at 1.5x revenue a firm with $10 million of sales is worth $15 million. Either way the result is the enterprise value, the value of the whole business. Any debt is repaid out of it before the owner keeps the rest.

Dividing what SGS paid in each period by the full-year revenue of the businesses it bought gives a multiple of revenue. The table sets it beside the median for TIC deals of all sizes in the same years, from our TIC valuation research.

These are SGS’s totals across all its purchases, priced on the shares it bought, so they are measured a little differently from the medians beside them.

Those figures answer how SGS has paid against the market. A firm under $50 million has a closer guide in our smallest size band, which covers TIC deals under $50 million. They sold for a median 1.52x revenue (80 deals) and 8.0x past EBITDA (21 deals), and the average SGS purchase, about $19 million, falls in that band. Its 1.52x sits below the 2.1x partly because it reaches back to 2015, and TIC medians were higher from 2021. Around those medians the spread is wide. The middle half of TIC deals from 2021 to 2025 sold for between 1.4x and 3.1x revenue, so a firm can land well above or below the middle.

SGS has stated one multiple, for ATS, its largest deal at $1.3 billion. It put the price at 11.2x the EBITDA it expects ATS to earn in 2026, including the savings and extra sales it plans, or 13.9x before those by our arithmetic (SGS release, 2 July 2025). For a smaller firm it is little guide, since it prices a $1.3 billion group on the profit expected the year after the deal was announced.

How SGS Structures a Deal

SGS’s 2015 annual report says “all acquisitions were settled in cash”, and of its purchases since, only ATS was paid partly in shares. For ATS, SGS said it would pay under $100 million of the price in its own shares to some shareholders and key employees, who must hold them for three years (SGS release, 2 July 2025). Its 2025 annual report, in the note on events after the year end, records those shares at about $40 million.

SGS reports a single figure for the part of the price still owed after closing. It mainly covers earn-outs (payments that depend on the business’s results after the sale) and amounts tied to warranty clauses (the promises a seller makes about the state of the business). That part came to 11% of what SGS paid in 2025 and has stayed at or below 23% of any year’s price since 2015.

In 12 of the 105 TIC acquisitions we count, the seller kept part of the company. SGS’s accounts describe put and call options on such retained shares. A put lets the seller require SGS to buy them, and a call lets SGS require the seller to sell. Its 2025 annual report says it values these with agreed formulas, most often a multiple of EBITDA or sales, adjusted for whether the business meets the targets in the agreement.

What Happens After Closing

Most firms SGS buys trade under the SGS name after closing. A few keep their own brand, and even then the SGS name can reach the company itself. Brightsight still trades as Brightsight, but its legal name is SGS Brightsight BV.

ATS, the largest of the kept brands, is run with SGS’s people at the top and a board of its own. It remains “a standalone entity with an SGS top management and a dedicated board”, chief executive Géraldine Picaud said on the half-year results call on 24 July 2026 (Investing.com transcript), and its brand stays while SGS makes the savings it planned. SGS’s half-year presentation reported savings at ATS in real estate and purchasing.

How far a smaller purchase is merged into SGS varies from deal to deal. On the same call Picaud described “a systematic approach, but not a dogmatic one”, adding, “It depends on the acquisition.” For a seller, the name, who runs the firm and how far it is folded into SGS are settled in each deal.

SGS Competitors: Who Else Buys Firms Like Yours

Sixteen other groups that buy TIC firms in numbers differ from SGS and from each other in who owns them and where they buy.

These counts put each buyer’s deals under its owner today, or, for buyers with their own profile on our site, use that profile’s count. Our 105 for SGS counts each deal under the buyer at the time, which leaves out the deals ATS made before SGS bought it. Which of these buyers would bid for your firm depends a good deal on where it is. Pace Analytical buys only in the US, and Alliance Technical Group and Onterris mostly there, while Eurofins, Kiwa, DEKRA, Phenna Group and Normec do most of their buying outside it.

The market rate is a median with a wide spread around it, the 1.4x to 3.1x of 2021 to 2025. Where a firm lands depends on the firm itself and on how many buyers with a real reason to want it are bidding. SGS has made 105 TIC acquisitions since 2015, and an owner who answers it alone has only SGS’s price and SGS’s terms to judge. We run a competitive process among the TIC groups, private equity platforms (companies owned by private equity firms that buy others in the same trade) and other buyers who have such a reason, so you choose between the best offers and get the best price and terms, including how much is paid in cash at closing. If keeping the company is the better choice, we say so.

Is This a Good Time to Sell to SGS?

SGS is still buying, with 19 TIC acquisitions in 2025 and 13 more by mid-November 2026, among them ATS, which it calls “the largest transaction in SGS’s history” (results release, 11 February 2026). On the half-year results call on 24 July 2026, Picaud spoke of bolt-ons, the smaller purchases SGS adds to its existing businesses. “We will continue on bolt-ons. Absolutely,” she said (Investing.com transcript).

Its 2024 plan names North America, sustainability and digital trust (cybersecurity and connectivity testing) as priorities. A new plan is due at its capital markets event on 17 and 18 November 2026.

Talk to us before you reply to SGS, put a figure in writing or sign a letter of intent (the document that usually gives one buyer exclusive talks). Our M&A advisory for TIC companies page explains how we work.

About Aventis Advisors

We advise owners on sales with typical enterprise values between $5M and $100M, as partners of the Globalscope network. We also advise serial acquirers, which is how we know the way their offers are built and where they leave room.

Recent transactions:

• Advice to Apave on its acquisitions of ISOCERT and De Duurzame Adviseurs.
• Sale of CKSource, the rich-text editor developer, to PSG via Tiugo Technologies, after a global process that drew several letters of intent.
• Advice to Visma on its acquisition of SaldeoSMART.

“We were impressed with Marcin’s negotiating skills and Aventis’ ability to make things happen.”

Sindre Talleraas Holen, M&A Director, Visma

“Aventis Advisors did the heavy lifting so that our management team could stay focused on our business.”

Wiktor Walc, President, CKSource

Write to us at marcin.majewski@aventis-advisors.com. The first conversation is confidential.

Methodology

The count covers majority acquisitions of TIC firms by SGS since January 2015, all but four checked against SGS’s announcement or results report. The deals come from our TIC deal database, built from Mergermarket and public sources such as press releases, news and annual reports. Each deal is counted under the group that made it at the time, so the acquisitions ATS made before SGS bought it are stated apart. Our TIC valuation pages credit each deal to its buyer’s owner today and still count some deals this check removed, so they show a higher count for SGS. SGS’s annual reports count more businesses than we do, 112 for 2015 to 2025 against our 92, because they include purchases outside TIC and some small ones our data lack.

SGS’s figures divide the price SGS reported for the shares it bought by the full-year revenue it reported for the businesses bought, summed over each period. From 2015 to 2020 SGS paid about $1.19 billion for 66 businesses with about $820 million of full-year revenue, and from 2021 to 2025 about $930 million for 46 businesses with about $430 million. The later total includes about $57 million that SGS booked, without paying cash, when it took control of a joint venture in which it already held half; without it the figure is 2.0x. These totals cover all of SGS’s purchases, some outside TIC, and the price of the shares bought, with the businesses’ debt and cash left out, so they can sit above or below a multiple of enterprise value. SGS’s Swiss franc figures are converted at SGS’s own average rate for each year.

The TIC medians come from the deals with a disclosed multiple in our TIC valuation research (2,841 TIC deals since 2015 in all) and use enterprise value (equity value plus net debt). Deals are placed in size bands by enterprise value where disclosed, otherwise by deal value; EBITDA multiples outside 1x to 60x and two outlier deals are left out. The table of competing buyers counts each buyer’s TIC deals since 2015 under its owner today, or, for a buyer with its own profile on our site, at that profile’s count (for Phenna Group, since its formation in 2019).