In mid-2024, Partners Group announced the sale of Techem — Germany's dominant provider of smart submetering solutions for residential buildings — at an enterprise value of €6.7 billion. The deal implied a multiple of 24.5× EBIT and approximately 6.6× revenue. Both figures sit well above sector averages for industrial services companies.
The buyer consortium — Partners Group Infrastructure, GIC, TPG Rise Climate, and Mubadala — reflects who is willing to pay infrastructure multiples: sovereign wealth funds and infrastructure-mandate capital, not classic PE buyout funds. That distinction matters enormously for how the asset was priced.
Why the PE seller became an infrastructure asset
Partners Group originally acquired Techem in 2018 through its private equity business. By the time it sold in 2024-2025, the buyer paid through the infrastructure mandate. The business had been repositioned.
Techem's core service — submetering heat and water consumption across 13 million residential units — has four characteristics that infrastructure investors prize above all others: regulatory mandate (EU energy efficiency directives require submetering), high switching costs (replacing installed devices and contracts across hundreds of thousands of properties is prohibitively expensive), recurring revenue (multiyear contracts with utilities and property managers), and macro tailwind (the European energy transition makes building efficiency measurement mandatory, not optional).
Partners Group spent six years converting a serviceable PE asset into an infrastructure-grade cashflow machine. EBITDA grew approximately 50% during their ownership. Revenue crossed €1 billion.
The EBIT vs EBITDA distinction
The deal was disclosed at 24.5× EBIT, not EBITDA. This is unusual and worth unpacking. For a capital-intensive business with significant depreciation on installed devices (Techem has 62 million devices in the field), EBIT is materially lower than EBITDA. If Techem's D&A margin was approximately 10–12% of revenue, the implied EBITDA multiple would sit closer to 14–17× — still above sector averages, but less striking than the headline number.
Buyers structuring infrastructure acquisitions often quote EBIT multiples because they intend to maintain the asset base, not harvest it. For them, depreciation is a real cash cost, not an add-back.
What this means for non-infrastructure businesses
Most SMEs will not sell to a GIC or Mubadala. But the Techem case illustrates a principle that applies at every deal size: the buyer type determines the multiple as much as the business fundamentals.
A logistics business with long-term contracts and minimal churn may not be positioned as infrastructure — but if it can be presented to a family office or long-duration PE fund rather than a classic 5-year buyout fund, the valuation conversation starts from a different baseline. Knowing which buyer universe your business fits before going to market is not optional. It is the core of sell-side strategy.
The EV/Revenue signal
At approximately 6.6× revenue, Techem's exit multiple is far above what most industrial services companies achieve (typically 0.8–1.5×). The premium comes from two things: the software-like economics of the recurring service business (once a submetering contract is installed, the annual fee rolls in with minimal variable cost), and the ESG mandate of the new buyer consortium. Infrastructure funds managing capital from sovereign wealth funds face increasing pressure to deploy into assets with credible climate theses. Techem is one of very few assets at this scale with a direct, measurable link to EU building decarbonisation.