As private equity squats across ever-greater swaths of the business world, the lines between itself and traditional enterprise are blurring. Witness, for instance, its expansion into asset classes such real estate, infrastructure and private credit or the push to offer products to retail clients. Now, the sector sports a new — less desirable — badge of corporate normality: the attention of antitrust regulators.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority plans to launch an investigation into the domestic petcare market. In the past 10 years, six major groups, three of which are private equity-owned, have bought 1,500 vet surgeries. That brings the share of such facilities owned by IVC Evidensia (owned by EQT and Silver Lake), Pets at Home, CVS, BC Partners’ VetPartners, CVC’s Medivet and Linnaeus to almost 60 per cent of the total. CVS shares lost about a quarter of their value on Tuesday.
While the CMA is focusing on the whole market, rather than on private equity-owned firms specifically, the sector is attracting increasing regulatory attention. In the US, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has private equity acquisition strategies in her sights. In September, the FTC sued US Anesthesia Partners, the dominant provider of anaesthesia services in Texas, and its private equity owner Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.