On Wednesday, Nelson Peltz’s activist hedge fund Trian Partners confirmed that it had bought a “significant position” in the British pest control company Rentokil Initial. Shares of the company went up by as much as 16%.
Trian Partners, an activist fund that Peltz started in 2005, told MarketWatch that it has bought a stake in Rentokil of an unknown size. This makes Trian Partners one of the ten biggest shareholders in Rentokil.
Trian also confirms that it has contacted Rentokil to talk about ways to increase the value of its shares. Someone from the hedge fund added, “Trian is excited to work with Rentokil’s leadership team.”
There was a big drop in October because people were worried about Rentokil Initial RTO, 12.24% shares, and they were up 13% by Wednesday morning in London. They had lost 27% of their value over the past year.
Trian Partners, which is known for taking a strong stance against big companies like Heinz, DuPont, and Disney, did not say how much of a stake it had in Rentokil.
Taxi company Rentokil told MarketWatch that it will not put out a statement on the London Stock Exchange because it has “not been informed of a holding above 3%.”
Whenever a company buys a stake in a U.K. listed company worth more than 3%, it has to report the transaction on the London Stock Exchange.
Twelve-F filings from 2023 show that Trian Partners, which was founded in 2005 by Peltz, Peter May, and Ed Garden, was in charge of about $7 billion in assets.
This company was started by Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, a British entomologist, in 1925, while he was still a professor at Imperial College London.
The company with its headquarters in Crawley was founded to sell a pesticide that was made to kill beetles in the Houses of Parliament. In 1969, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange.
Maxwell-Lefroy later died in 1925 in an accident in his lab that involved poisonous gases that were being used to keep houseflies away.
Rentokil bought Terminix, a pest control company based in Tennessee, for about £4.5 billion in October 2022. This made Rentokil the biggest pest control company in the world.
After a year, in October 2023, Rentokil said that its growth would slow because of a slowdown in the North American economy. This caused its share price to drop more than a fifth.
The company’s annual report shows that Rentokil made £4.93 million in pre-tax profits and £5.4 billion in sales in the financial year 2023.
