NVM Private Equity takes majority stake in Easby Group

NVM Private Equity backed the management buyout of Easby Group in March 2022, at an enterprise value of £10–30M. The perimeter covered Easby Electronics and Delta Impact. Four senior executives, Nigel Copely, Gregor Ross, Phil Clarke and Eamon Francis, became shareholders, and Jonathan Simpson-Dent joined the board as chairman on completion. It was the tenth investment from NVM’s Vintage III fund. Easby Group distributes electronic components. It holds franchises from manufacturers, stocks their parts in its own warehouses at Richmond in North Yorkshire and at Newbury and Thatcham in Berkshire, and despatches the same day. Its range covers power supplies, capacitors, resistors, connectors, relays, switches and displays. What distinguishes this from simple reselling is where the relationship begins. An engineer designing a product chooses its components years before production, and once that choice is made and the board laid out, changing a part means redesigning and requalifying. Easby’s field applications engineers work with manufacturers at that design stage, advising on which parts to specify, which locks in the supply that follows. The company had done this for more than forty years. That position had taken it into markets growing quickly: charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, smart energy systems, connected devices, building management and 5G equipment, which together had driven double-digit growth over the preceding three years. The British market for component distribution was worth a little under 2 billion pounds, divided among many operators. NVM invested to fund the company’s share of that market, and the group was recruiting senior managers, salespeople and field applications engineers at the time of the transaction. Womble Bond Dickinson advised on legal matters, with Crowe on financial due diligence, Graph Strategy on commercial, Continuum on management, Sooner Advisory on debt, PwC on tax structuring, Lockton on insurance and Blair West on human capital.