Cleanaway (CWY) eyeing big acquisition
The waste management company has announced a deal that it’s been working on for the past 12 months, having finally reached an agreement to buy the Australian waste management assets of Suez SA for $2.5bn. It’s a complicated transaction and still may fall over given Suez is currently under takeover from French suitor Veolia, who is very keen not to see the divestment happen.
It seems a lot more to play out here, however the deal if it happens would be a very good one for Cleanaway transforming it into one of the biggest waste management companies in the country with a suite of irreplaceable assets and importantly, scale across the country. The pricing of the deal looks attractive on 11.7x normalised EBITDA, about the same level as CWY is currently trading. CWY will need to raise equity to fund the deal.
