Yahoo Finance FTSE giant weighs £25bn switch to Wall Street in fresh blow to London
One of Britain’s leading blue-chip companies is exploring a move to New York in what would be one of the biggest blows yet to the London Stock Exchange.
Ashtead, the FTSE 100 plant hire giant, is in the early stages of considering whether to switch its stock market listing from the UK to the US, which is where the vast bulk of its business is generated.
The review will blindside officials in the Square Mile after Ashtead previously made a series of pledges to remain listed in Britain.
It is understood the company has instructed City advisers to undertake a full examination of the merits of such a shift.
It comes as UK corporates with large American operations increasingly look to abandon the City, in the hope that a move to Wall Street will provide a sharp boost in value.
Among those that have either departed entirely, or sought a secondary listing in the US, are betting company Flutter, cement-maker CRH and plumbing business Ferguson.
Ashtead rents out heavy machinery and equipment, such as cranes, excavators and scaffolding, to the construction industry.
With a stock market valuation of £24bn, it ranks among the top quartile of publicly listed companies in the UK, sitting directly behind NatWest in the FTSE 100 by market cap.
Though the board, led by chairman Paul Walker, is expected to take its time reaching a decision, City sources said there were a string of factors favouring a transatlantic shift.
More than 90pc of Ashtead’s near-£11bn annual turnover stemmed from sales in North America last year, up from 80pc in 2022.
This makes it the second-largest equipment rental outfit in the US, where it trades under the Sunbelt Rentals brand.
It also has operations in Canada and the UK, where growth has historically been much slower than in the US.
In March, Ashtead said it expected revenue growth of between 11pc to 13pc for the US and Canada, whereas that figure fell to between 6pc and 9pc in the UK.
Ashtead has also recently been a significant beneficiary of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which has made almost $370bn in tax breaks and subsidies available for green energy projects.
Chief executive Brendan Horgan has previously said the company was winning business tied to mega-projects such as “new electric vehicle manufacturing plants, the battery gigafactories to support that [and] liquid natural gas plants that are being built”.
Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange Group, has blamed higher pay for the exodus of British executives and companies across the Atlantic.
Bosses at S&P 500 US companies are paid three times as much as those in the UK – an average of $16.7m (£13.1m), according to the US trade unions federation AFL-CIO.
Mr Horgan, an American citizen, is no stranger to pay disputes. Ashtead has suffered several shareholder rebellions in recent years over his remuneration. He earned £6.4m in 2023.
Pressed on the possibility of a US move last March, Mr Horgan said Ashtead’s stock market listing was “a topic that the board periodically takes under review”. However, the company’s position “remains to be a FTSE constituent,” he said.
“In the meantime, I prefer to focus on growing the business. That is the only sure-fire way to add value for all of our stakeholders, that is what gets me up in the morning and that is our motivation,” he added.
In June, Horgan again backed London as the main trading venue for its shares, as he told the Evening Standard: “We remain happy where we are. Our listing domicile in London has in no way prevented us from executing our strategy.”
A spokesman for the company said: “Ashtead reviews its capital structure regularly, including its domicile, recognising the fact that 90pc of its business is in the USA”.
