Edwards Group has become the latest British manufacturing business to be acquired by a foreign rival after Sweden's Atlas Copco bought the company in a $1.6bn (£1bn) deal.
The takeover comes less than a month after Invensys, one of the last survivors from the era of British industrial conglomerates, agreed to a £3.4bn takeover by France's Schneider Electric.
Edwards, the market leader in vacuum pumps for the chemical and semiconductor industries, is an international success, with a third of its income generated from the US and more than half from Asia.
Atlas Copco's chief executive, Ronnie Leten, said: "It's a $6bn market, and it is still growing. This project is a real growth project. Of course, there are cost synergies, but the main driving factor for us is to create synergies within sales and services from compressors and vacuums."
Atlas Copco is one of Sweden's biggest industrial companies, but it has suffered recently owing to its exposure to the mining sector. Analysts said acquiring Edwards, which based in Crawley, West Sussex, would reduce Atlas Copco's share of earnings from mining and rock excavation products. Edwards is co-controlled by two private equity groups, CCMP and Unitas Capital.
Like Invensys, Edwards has a long history and has been in business for nearly 100 years. However, as its strong links to the US and Asian markets show, the company has now taken on an international dimension. It has offices all over the world, including China, Singapore, Argentina and the US. It floated on the Nasdaq exchange in New York in 2012.
Invensys, which develops computer systems for refineries and chemical and nuclear plants, was created by the merger of two industrial conglomerates, BTR and Siebe.
However, as the Schneider and Atlas Copco deals show, a corporate trend appears to be re-emerging for UK businesses to become part of larger industrial groups. Analysts touted the Edwards deal as a diversification of Atlas Copco, adding another unit to the Scandinavian group.
"It is something which is quite clear that Atlas has intended to do: expand its business in surrounding disciplines," said Peter Frolen, an analyst at Handelsbanken. "This is going to generate revenue and cost synergies."
Atlas Copco said it would pay up to $10.50 a share for Edwards, including net debt, representing a 24% premium to Friday's closing price of $8.45. Edwards, whose competitors include Japan's Ebara and Gardner Denver in the US, employs more than 3,200 people in 20 countries and had revenues of £595m pounds in 2012, or about 7% of Atlas's sales.
The most high-profile non-UK ownership of British industrial businesses is in car manufacturing, with Mini, Bentley and Jaguar Land Rover all in foreign hands.
