Ashtead Technology Holdings Plc (LSE:AT.) is looking for acquisitions. During the Ashtead Technology H1 2026 Results Presentation, Allan Pirie, CEO, said, "We continue to make strategic progress through the first half. We're building an increasingly sophisticated and diversified business through a unique portfolio of equipment and services and global footprint to serve the global offshore energy industry across the full life cycle of subsea infrastructure.
We acquired Seadraulics, creating a strategic footprint in Australia to accelerate growth in that market. We consolidated 3 U.K. Mechanical Solutions operations into 1, creating a global center of excellence to better service our customers, and we continue to build out good capability, investing GBP 25.9 million in technology for the long term." "There are growth opportunities to expand our service capabilities across both geographical and end markets. Survey and Robotics will continue to benefit from increasing customer propensity to rent.
Significant opportunities exist to expand our mechanical solutions capability by internationalizing what we already have. We are continuing to make progress building out our U.S. capability, having opened a facility in Houston last year, and we took possession of the new mechanical solutions facility in Norway yesterday." "We continue to cultivate these type of M&A opportunities, which act as catalysts of change to better support our customers." Allan Pirie further said "The opportunity that we're most excited about around M&A is consolidating what is a super fragmented mechanical solutions market. So that is building around capabilities that we've already got, infilling and scaling those, but also expanding the capabilities beyond what we currently do.
So we started that process by buying UCS back in 2019. So that was to move into the decommissioning space. So we bought a business that was very much focused on the North Sea, supplying diamond wire saw shear pumps or shear cutters and dredge pumps.
The natural next step was to acquire Hiretech, which was a key supplier, supplying back deck pumps for powering the subsea equipment. We then had the opportunity to acquire ACE Winches for their lifting pooling deployment capabilities. And that really creates a package that no one else is providing, but there are multiple opportunities to acquire businesses in the adjacent space that continues to build out that capability.
So we feel that there's a very logical process to build out something of far bigger scale in Mechanical Solutions".
