Halfords announces acquisition of LTC Trading Holdings

Halfords Group has announced the acquisition of LTC Trading Holdings Limited and its subsidiary Lodge Tyre Company for total consideration of £37.2m, with £33.2m paid on completion and £4m paid in FY25 subject to performance.

Lodge Tyre provides automotive services to business-to-business customers from 50 garages and 248 mobile vans. The acquisition takes the Halfords garage services business to 656 garages, 253 consumer vans, 440 commercial vans and 9 warehouses.

Lodge Tyre generated pro forma EBITDA of £4.7m on a pre-IFRS 16 basis in the year ending 31 March 2021. Halfords said it expects to deliver incremental synergies worth £3.8m (EBITDA) by year five.

Graham Stapleton, chief executive officer of halfords, said: “The acquisition of Lodge Tyre is yet another example of Halfords’ strategic aim of becoming a Motoring Services-focused business, and will mean that Motoring accounts for over three quarters of our total revenue.

“The current trading environment reinforces the rationale for building ever-more resilient, needs-based revenue streams, which is exactly what the Motoring category offers. Within that, the nature of the commercial tyre market means that it is non-discretionary and therefore extremely well insulated against macroeconomic uncertainty.”

He added: “Lodge is an outstanding operation that perfectly complements our existing commercial tyre businesses of McConechy’s and Universal Tyres, and gives us a much greater reach across the UK.  We were already the UK’s market-leading Motoring Service provider to consumers, and this acquisition will also make us the UK’s largest commercial tyre provider. We look forward to welcoming the Lodge team to the Halfords family.”