MYD Capital Partners advises industrial and manufacturing companies with €50M–€500M in annual revenue on selling, buying, forming partnerships and preparing for a transaction. Our work spans heavy industry, automotive supply, chemicals, mining and natural resources, defense and aerospace — capital-intensive businesses where value sits in assets, qualifications and long-cycle customer relationships rather than in growth rate.
Industrial businesses are frequently undervalued for a specific and fixable reason: the things that make them durable are difficult to see from the outside. A customer qualification that took four years to obtain, a process capability no competitor in the region holds, a plant with genuine surplus capacity — none of these appear in the financial statements, and all of them change what an acquirer will pay when they are documented properly.
Where we focus
- Heavy industry and capital equipment. Machinery, equipment and industrial systems manufacturers, valued on installed base, aftermarket revenue and engineering capability.
- Automotive supply. Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, where programme awards, platform lifecycle position and customer qualification status determine forward visibility.
- Chemicals and specialty materials. Producers and formulators, valued on process capability, regulatory registration position and feedstock exposure.
- Mining and natural resources. Extraction and processing operations, where reserve documentation, permitting and environmental position are examined before economics.
- Defense. Suppliers to defense primes and government programmes, where clearances, programme position and export control compliance are central.
- Aerospace. Component and systems manufacturers, valued on certification scope, approved-supplier status and programme lifecycle.
- Industrial services. Maintenance, engineering and technical services businesses with recurring customer relationships.
What buyers and investors look for
Asset quality and remaining useful life, properly documented. A plant with a genuine maintenance record and identified remaining capacity is a different asset from one with the same book value and a decade of deferred capital expenditure.
Beyond assets, counterparties examine customer qualification and approved-supplier status, which frequently represents years of investment and constitutes a real barrier to entry; programme and contract position, including lifecycle stage and re-tender exposure; process capability and certification scope; order backlog with margin visibility rather than revenue visibility alone; and environmental standing, including site contamination history and the cost of compliance with pending regulation.
Energy intensity and the exposure that creates has become a standard diligence line in this sector rather than a specialist one.
What lowers valuation
Customer concentration, which is structural in automotive and aerospace supply and therefore needs to be presented with the contractual protections that offset it rather than left to be discovered. Programme exposure concentrated in platforms late in their lifecycle. Deferred capital expenditure that an acquirer will have to fund in the first two years.
Environmental liability is the distinctive risk in this sector: site contamination history, remediation obligations, and the capital cost of compliance with regulation that has been announced but not yet applied. These are rarely fatal and almost always expensive to address late, because an acquirer will price the worst plausible case in the absence of documentation.
Also material: key-person dependency in engineering and process knowledge that has never been documented; and working capital tied up in inventory that reflects a supply chain decision nobody has revisited.
Cross-border interest
Industrial assets attract strategic acquirers seeking capacity, capability or geographic footprint, and increasingly acquirers seeking supply chain resilience through regional production. Private equity is active in platform consolidation across fragmented industrial subsectors. Sovereign and institutional capital has been a consistent participant in natural resources and infrastructure-adjacent industry.
Cross-border industrial transactions carry distinctive gating items — export control, foreign investment screening in defense and dual-use sectors, and in several jurisdictions national security review that can determine the counterparty pool before commercial terms are discussed. These belong at the start of a process, not in its final weeks.
Preparing for a transaction
A structured readiness process, aligned with The Goldsmith™, typically covers:
- Asset register with condition assessment, remaining useful life and deferred capital expenditure quantified
- Maintenance records and capital expenditure history by asset
- Customer qualification and approved-supplier documentation, with renewal requirements
- Programme and contract register with lifecycle position and re-tender dates
- Order backlog restated with margin by contract rather than revenue alone
- Process capability documentation and certification scope
- Environmental site history, including any contamination assessment and remediation obligations
- Compliance position against pending as well as current environmental regulation
- Energy consumption profile and exposure to price and regulatory change
- Export control and dual-use classification where applicable
- Health and safety record with incident history
- Engineering and process knowledge documented rather than held individually
- Inventory ageing and the true working capital requirement through a cycle
Our Readiness Assessment benchmarks industrial companies against these dimensions before a process begins.
How we work with industrial and manufacturing companies
Most engagements begin with The Goldsmith™. In this sector the highest-value early work is usually making the invisible visible: documenting the qualifications, capabilities and asset positions that constitute the real barrier to entry, and quantifying the environmental and capital expenditure positions before an acquirer's team prices them defensively.
The Confluence™ then builds and scores the counterparty universe — strategic acquirers, industrial platforms, infrastructure and resources capital — and manages the process to signature, including the regulatory clearance workstream where a cross-border transaction requires one. Industrial businesses are also frequent candidates for The Dawn™, because capital intensity and cyclicality combine to produce debt structures that stop fitting the business long before anyone renegotiates them.
Frequently asked questions
Our largest customer is 40% of revenue. Does that make us unsellable?
No, and in automotive and aerospace supply it is close to normal. What matters is the contractual position behind it: programme awards, qualification status, switching cost and term. Concentration presented with that context is priced very differently from concentration discovered in diligence.
How are environmental liabilities handled in a transaction?
With documentation, ideally obtained before the process begins. In the absence of an assessment, acquirers assume the worst plausible case and price accordingly. A completed environmental review — even one that identifies obligations — usually costs less than the discount applied without it.
We have deferred capital expenditure. Should we catch up before selling?
Sometimes, and sometimes not. The relevant comparison is between the cost of the work and the discount an acquirer will apply, which depends on the asset and the acquirer. That analysis belongs in the readiness work, and it is one of the more common places where the intuitive answer is wrong.
Will foreign investment screening block a cross-border sale?
Rarely outright, but in defense, dual-use and critical infrastructure it shapes which counterparties can realistically transact and how long the process takes. Establishing that at the start narrows the universe deliberately rather than expensively.