EQT agrees to buy Australia's Cleanaway Waste Management for $6.5 billion

EQT didn't just make an offer this time. It signed one. The Swedish private equity firm has locked in a binding deal to take over Australia's biggest waste company, and shareholders get a dividend on the way out the door too.

Cleanaway Waste Management and EQT Infrastructure announced on Monday, October 19, that they've entered a scheme implementation deed: EQT's acquisition vehicle, Sedum Group Pty Ltd, will buy 100% of Cleanaway's shares for A$3.095 in cash each, less any dividends paid before the deal closes. Bloomberg reported the transaction values the company at roughly A$9.3 billion, or about $6.5 billion. Cleanaway shares jumped as much as 20% on the news.

This isn't where the number started. When EQT first went public with a proposal in August, it was offering A$3.13 a share and talking up a 32% premium. Over nine weeks of exclusive due diligence, extended at least once while the two sides argued over the implementation deed, the price settled a notch lower, at A$3.095. According to Capital Brief, the final terms still represent a 34.5% premium to Cleanaway's three-month volume-weighted average price, and work out to roughly 20 times the company's FY26 EBIT. EQT said on October 11 it wouldn't move the terms in a way that made the deal worse for shareholders, and it kept that promise on headline price even as the exact per-share figure shifted.

There's a sweetener most takeover coverage will skip past. Cleanaway's board will pay a fully franked special dividend of between A$0.145 and A$0.190 a share before the deal is implemented, on top of the cash consideration. For a retail shareholder holding the stock since well before August, that's a direct cash return layered on top of the buyout price, not just a number on a termsheet.

Cleanaway runs more than 6,400 vehicles, a national network of recycling facilities, transfer stations, engineered landfills, liquid treatment plants and refineries, and employs over 10,000 people. None of that sounds like the kind of thing that gets a 34% premium bidding war. But that's the point. EQT isn't buying a waste collector, it's buying a regulated, hard-to-replicate piece of national infrastructure with contracted, inflation-linked revenue, the same logic that has sent private equity chasing toll roads, ports, and data centers over the past few years.

Frankly, this is where the smart infrastructure money has been quietly going while everyone was watching AI chip deals. A landfill permit in Australia takes years and local opposition to secure. Once you own the network, your competitors can't just build a new one next door. EQT's own valuation math, reported by Business News Australia, leans on Cleanaway's FY27 guidance of A$500 million to A$530 million in underlying EBIT, which brings the real multiple closer to 18.3 times forward earnings rather than the headline 20 times trailing.

The deal still has a long runway before it closes. It needs sign-off from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Foreign Investment Review Board, and unusually, from competition regulators in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia too, a reminder of how global EQT's own investor base and portfolio have become. Cleanaway's scheme meeting is expected at the end of February 2027, with implementation targeted for the end of March 2027.

That's five months away. A lot can happen to a scheme of arrangement in five months, especially one that needs sign-off from four separate regulators across three continents. Until then, Cleanaway keeps running the bins, the landfills, and the recycling plants exactly as before, just with a buyer's clock now ticking in the background.

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