The stubborn bet that built a €375m company: Rewinding the week that was
A little under 20 years ago, I made my way to Sligo to meet Fergal Broder.
His company, LotusWorks, was in the midst of an international expansion push with ambitious plans to propel the business forward in North America and China. The company employed 300 people at the time, delivering instrumentation, automation, engineering and construction services to a variety of process and manufacturing industries.
But Broder had bigger plans for the company he had founded at the end of the 1980s. It was looking at a number of international acquisitions and was eyeing up a move into the renewable energy market.
But the locality mattered. Even then, Broder was determined to make it happen from his office on the outskirts of Sligo town, a state-of-the-art factory that, on a clear day, had pristine views over the Atlantic Ocean.
‘‘Why would I want to move anywhere else?” Broder asked me.
“We have seven or eight beaches within 20 minutes, and the quality of life is great here. Most of our clients are multinationals, so a two-and-a-half-hour drive is nothing to them. Geography does not matter.”
When we spoke in 2008, it looked like a company on a steady upward trajectory.
But Broder revealed a different story that day also.
Just a few years after founding the business, then known as Lotus Automation, in 1989, Lotus had effectively hit the wall. Broder described a period where the company ran into serious trouble with creditors, banks and the tax authorities.
Everyone told him the same thing: Shut down the company and move on.
Instead, he ignored that advice, opting to “trade his way out”.
‘‘It was the school of hard knocks,” he said. ‘‘We ran into bother with the taxman and with creditors and with the banks. It was a bleak period, but we worked hard and clawed our way out of it. In a way, it spurred me on to succeed.”
And succeed he did.
The company pivoted toward multinational clients, particularly US firms investing in Ireland, and built a model around high-spec, niche engineering services – “the high-end stuff,” as he put it.
The company went from strength to strength, navigating its way through recessions, downturns, and much more besides.
Indeed, a decade after we met, Broder sold the business in a management buy-out to executives James Casey, Gerard Sproule, Mark Butler, and Emer Conroy.
He remained with the company but began to invest in a host of other young start-ups, devoting significant time to mentoring young entrepreneurs.
It was, in many ways, a natural progression. Even back in 2008, Broder had spoken about giving key people real responsibility and autonomy, and about the importance of having “skin in the game”.
The MBO formalised that philosophy. The people who had helped build the company – and steer it through both growth and downturns – were now directly invested in its future.
The business had come through the financial crisis, expanded its footprint in the US and Europe, and established itself in sectors like life sciences, semiconductors and data centres. The MBO effectively set the stage for the next phase – one where growth could be accelerated, but also where the company would be structured in a way that made it more attractive to external investors or strategic buyers.
That longer-term evolution came into sharp focus last week when it emerged that French firm Bureau Veritas was buying LotusWorks in a deal that gave the Sligo business an enterprise value (equity, debt, and cash) of €375 million.
The company has grown significantly over the years. Revenues at LotusWorks reached €131 million, headcount has grown to around 750, and its services – from commissioning and calibration to quality assurance and construction management – were embedded in some of the most critical global industries, including semiconductors and data centres.
These are sectors now experiencing a surge in investment, driven in part by AI and the expansion of digital infrastructure.
Bureau Veritas chief executive, Hinda Gharbi, said the acquisition was a “major milestone” for the company that would establish a unique platform for commissioning, validation and technical assurance for critical assets.
Bureau Veritas is one of the largest testing, inspection, and certification companies in the world. It is almost 200 years old and operates across food supply chains, energy and manufacturing industries, and shipping. Veritas reported €6.5 billion in revenue last year and employs more than 80,000 people in 140 countries, but did not have an Irish presence yet.
The Paris-listed group is just one of three French multinationals acquiring companies on this island since the start of this month.
Also serving the data-centre industry, Cookstown, Co Tyrone-based TES Group was acquired by another French PLC, the electrical equipment giant Legrand, in a deal announced on April 1. TES is a European specialist in power distribution systems with 280 staff and £72 million (€85 million) in annual revenue.
Legrand paid €285 million in total for TES and another acquisition announced on the same day, the Chinese-based server rack manufacturer Keydak. The Co Tyrone company was the largest of the two and its seller, the UK private-equity firm Foresight, claimed a fourfold return on its investment started in November 2024 with clients including AIB and the British Business Bank. Considering TES reported a £37 million Foresight investment in equity alone that year (plus some debt), Legrand may have paid upwards of €150 million for the fast-growing business.
The next day, also in Cookstown, the McIvor family in Co Tyrone agreed to sell their all-Ireland equipment-hire business KDM to Kiloutou. KDM Hire has over 240 employees and over £36 million (€42 million) in annual revenue. Kiloutou is majority-owned by HLD, the French family office that sold the Dentressangle logistics group to US-based XPO a decade ago for more than €3 billion.
Kiloutou has been on a recent European M&A spree. “With this acquisition, we’re opening up new growth prospects in one of the most dynamic economies in Europe,” its CEO, Olivier Colleau, said in a video announcing the deal. He then displayed an honourable attempt at Irish dancing.
What links all three deals is not just the buyers’ nationality, but the sectors they are targeting – infrastructure, data centres, engineering services – all areas where Ireland and the wider region have quietly built real depth and expertise.
For LotusWorks, the journey from near-collapse in the early 1990s to a €375 million sale is a reminder that success is rarely linear. It is shaped as much by resilience and reinvention as it is by strategy. Broder’s decision to “trade his way out” when others advised retreat now reads less like stubbornness and more like conviction.
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