Holland’s Boels Expands in U.K. Acquiring Artisan Hire Centre and SAS
Leading European rental company Boels Rental has acquired Artisan Hire Centre and sister company SAS (Survey & Safety Equipment Hire and Sales). The acquisition is an additional step in Boels’ overall United Kingdom growth strategy to become a national rental company. Artisan and SAS operate from nine branches in the southwest of England.
These latest additions follow the acquisition of Supply UK Hire Shops in 2017 and Already Hire in 2018, and gives Boels 38 branches in the U.K.
“This is an important milestone in our ongoing expansion as an international rental company,” said Pierre Boels, CEO of Boels Rental. “Artisan and SAS are both well-established and very successful in the southwest of England. Their acquisition can only benefit the growth strategy that Boels has for Great Britain. Although our ultimate aim is to achieve national coverage, we will focus primarily on local and regional businesses for the time being. We want to make sure that more and more customers are able to benefit from our high-quality service provision. In the years ahead, we will focus very much on expanding our fleet and these acquisitions are an important step forward in this respect.”
“We are very happy to be part of the Boels family,” said Chris Comer of Artisan Hire Centres. “We clicked straight away and discovered that we have the same plans for the future too. Boels is a major player in the rental market, because of which we will have the opportunity to accelerate our growth under its wing. This is possible thanks in part to the huge amount of knowledge and experience that Boels is able to share with us.”
In addition to temporary fencing specialist Amdyte, Boels acquired two specialists in the industrial rental business earlier this year: Abird and Delta Rent. It also acquired Van Deuveren Traffic on July 1, a company specializing in the rental of mobile direction signs, along with other related items.
Boels Rentals is based in Sittard, Netherlands.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.