GE Vernova buys Trench Group for $9B

Trench makes bushings, instrument transformers and coils for high- and medium-voltage power grids. It sells them to more than 800 utilities and large cloud companies, and GE Vernova is already a customer. It has more than 3,000 staff at 11 sites in Europe, North America and Asia.

Between the two most recent sales, Trench’s yearly revenue grew by a third, from €684M to €907M. The price rose about 16 times. Most of the rise came from what a buyer pays for each euro of revenue: 0.7 times in 2024, 8.8 times now. GE Vernova says it is paying 13 times the operating profit, before depreciation and amortisation, that it expects Trench to make in 2028.

Buyers of other grid-equipment makers mostly divided the price by the revenue expected in the year of the deal or the year after. On that basis, GE Vernova pays 6.4 times its forecast of Trench’s 2026 revenue.

Before 2025, buyers of grid-equipment makers paid between 1.1 and 2.8 times revenue. In 2025, Hubbell paid 6.3 times for DMC Power and TE Connectivity 5.8 times for Richards Manufacturing, which both make connectors and cable fittings for power grids. GE Vernova’s price for Trench is close to those two deals.

Triton is selling Trench for about 16 times what it paid. Among other sales of $3B or more by private equity firms to corporate buyers since 2021, the highest is 10.3 times, for NFP after ten years. Most sold for 1.3 to 3 times what the seller paid.

The ratio compares two prices, not Triton’s return. Triton also bought three smaller companies for Trench while it owned it, and the sale price includes them.

Trench is GE Vernova’s largest acquisition since it was spun off from GE in April 2024. The largest before it was the $5.3B GE Vernova agreed in October 2025 to pay for the half of the transformer maker Prolec GE it did not already own. Trench already supplies GE Vernova with bushings.