Corporate Greed (Part 5): The takeover of vet med in Australia (#468)

Rick LeCouteur
Dec 6, 2025
7 min read

Walk into many Australian veterinary clinics in 2025 and the signage still whispers family practice: familiar names, smiling vets on the wall, the reassuring language of local care.

Look behind the logo, though, and you often find something else entirely.

A global private-equity fund in Stockholm, New York, Sydney or Toronto, quietly extracting returns from the love Australians have for their animals.

This is not a morality play about good and bad ownership. It is a cautionary tale about what happens when a caring profession becomes an asset class, and what that means for veterinarians, nurses, and pet owners across Australia.

The First Big Wave: Greencross

The modern story starts with Greencross, founded in Townsville in the 1990s and floated on the ASX in 2007 as Australia’s first listed veterinary roll-up.

From there it expanded aggressively, buying clinics, pet crematoria, and ultimately the Petbarn and Animates retail chains.

In 2019, U.S. private-equity giant TPG Capital took Greencross private in a deal worth around A$669–970 million (US$438-634 million), delisting the company and loading it with substantial debt.

Since then:

Greencross has grown into the country’s largest pet-care group, with more than 160 vet clinics and over 230 retail stores, and a significant share of Australia’s specialty pet-retail and veterinary services market.

TPG has sold minority stakes to pension funds such as AustralianSuper and Canada’s HOOPP, at valuations in the mid-single-digit billions of dollars (widely reported at over A$3.5 billion [US$2.3 billion]).

On paper, it is a success story: consolidation, synergies, and handsome returns for investors.

But for the profession, Greencross also signaled something profound:

Veterinary medicine could be packaged, leveraged and traded

like any other consumer-facing asset.

Once that door opened, other funds followed.

The Second Wave: VetPartners

The next giant to loom over Australian vet med is VetPartners, built by National Veterinary Associates (NVA) as its platform in Australia and New Zealand.

By 2023 VetPartners controlled approximately 267 general practice clinics and specialty hospitals across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), employing around 1,300 vets and more than 3,000 nurses and support staff.

In October 2023, Swedish private-equity group EQT agreed to buy VetPartners from NVA in a deal reportedly worth about A$1.4 billion (US$920 million).

EQT now proudly lists VetPartners as the #1 veterinary clinic operator in ANZ in its healthcare portfolio.

The script is familiar:

Build or buy a large network of clinics.

Sell to a global private-equity fund at a rich multiple.

Load the platform with expectations of further growth and eventual resale, perhaps to another fund, a corporate giant, or the public markets.

VetPartners is no longer just a group of clinics; it is a financial vehicle inside a global fund that also owns pharma companies and other healthcare assets.

The New Consolidators: Vets Central, Apiam Vets and CVS.

The story doesn’t end with the two big beasts.

Vets Central has rapidly become the third-largest companion-animal group in Australia, with around 60 practices and more in the pipeline. It is backed by Sydney private equity firm Pemba Capital Partners, which joined via a capital raise in 2021. Like most private equity funds, Pemba’s investors will be seeking high (often mid-20% range) annual returns over a relatively short holding period (usually 4–7 years) using significant leverage.
Apiam Animal Health, long the last listed vet services provider in Australia, has itself grown into one of the country’s largest rural and regional veterinary groups, with more than 80 veterinary clinic sites plus ancillary businesses, over 1,000 staff, and a mix of companion, mixed and production-animal practices spread across most states. In 2025 the Bendigo-based group became the next target for private equity: Adamantem Capital has moved to take Apiam private via a scheme of arrangement at around 87–88 cents a share, valuing the company at roughly A$160 million (and more than A$220 million including debt). [If completed, the deal will remove the last pure veterinary listing from the ASX and shift yet another large, strategically important network from public or independent ownership into private-equity hands].
CVS Group, the listed UK veterinary giant, has quietly become another major consolidator in Australia. After entering the market in 2023 with a small cluster of clinics, CVS has expanded rapidly through acquisitions and joint-venture deals to more than 50 clinics across six states, employing hundreds of vets and nurses. Already under scrutiny by the UK Competition and Markets Authority over pricing and transparency concerns, CVS’s growing Australian footprint suggests the importing not only of foreign capital but also of foreign corporate models, with all the risks and regulatory questions they carry.

Beyond these, there is growing interest from other funds and corporate pet-care players circling the market, drawn by Australians’ willingness to spend heavily on their animals, even in the face of cost-of-living pressures.

The message to global investors is straightforward.

Australian vet med is open for business.

What’s the Problem? Isn’t This Just Capitalism?

Private equity, defenders argue, brings:

Capital for equipment and clinic upgrades.

Professional HR and management systems.

Networks of referral hospitals and emergency centers.

Career pathways and benefits for staff that small independents may struggle to match.

All of that can be true. But it is only half the story.

Private-equity funds are not charities.

They are designed to deliver outsized returns, typically within a 5–7 year window, often using high levels of debt financed by global investors.

That model creates powerful incentives that can sit uneasily with the ethos of a caring profession.

In practical terms, the risks are threefold:

Price and Access

Debt has to be serviced and returns delivered. The easiest levers are:

Raising fees.

Pushing average transaction value higher with tests, procedures and add-ons.

Cross-selling retail products and wellness plans through integrated chains.

For affluent, insured pet owners this may be tolerable.

For others, it means deferred care, painful financial compromises, and more economic euthanasias.

If UK experience is any guide, where corporate-owned practices now dominate and regulators have raised concerns about pricing and transparency, Australia should be paying attention.

Professional Autonomy and Burnout

When clinics become assets in a leveraged roll-up, clinical decisions are increasingly made in a context of:

Revenue targets.

Standardized protocols designed by head office.

Pressure to refer within the network rather than purely on merit.

Most corporate groups promise that clinical decisions remain with the vet. On a policy document, that may be true. On a busy Tuesday night when a young veterinarian is staring at their KPIs and worried about their job, the reality can feel more ambiguous.

The emotional toll is real: moral distress, burnout, and attrition from a profession that already struggles to retain experienced clinicians.

Loss of Local Ownership and Diversity

As Greencross, VetPartners, Vets Central and others expand, the number of genuinely independent clinics shrinks.

Apiam’s potential sale would remove the last listed Australian vet services company from the market.

Homogenization has consequences:

Fewer truly independent second opinions

Less diversity in business models and pricing.

Decisions about regional services made in boardrooms thousands of kilometers away

When your town has only corporate options, shopping around becomes an illusion of choice.

Why This Is a Cautionary Tale, Not Just a Complaint

None of this means corporate or private-equity ownership is inherently evil.

There are corporates trying to balance profit with genuine care, and there are independent clinics that fail both their staff and patients.

The caution lies in scale and opacity:

When a significant share of Australian vet med is controlled by a handful of highly leveraged platforms, systemic risks grow: pricing power, wage suppression, and the temptation to financialize every aspect of care.

When ownership is obscured (i.e., when a clinic looks local but is actually part of a global fund), clients cannot make informed choices, and public scrutiny is blunted.

Australia has watched this movie before in aged care, childcare, and pathology. Vet med is simply the latest sector to attract global capital in search of defensive, non-cyclical cashflows.

The lesson from those other industries is simple:

If you wait until the damage is obvious, it is very hard to unwind.

What Needs to Happen Next

If this is a cautionary tale, what are we being cautioned to do?

Radical Transparency

Mandatory disclosure of ultimate beneficial ownership for all veterinary clinics and hospitals.
Clear signage and website statements so consumers know whether they are supporting an independent, a local group, or a global fund.
Honest communication about relationships with pharmaceutical companies, pet insurers and retail partners.

Transparency doesn’t solve everything, but it removes the helmet that protects the juggernaut from scrutiny.

Smarter Regulation

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) and state regulators should track consolidation and debt levels in the sector, learning from the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s current investigation into vet pricing and corporate ownership.

Consider limits on anti-competitive non-compete clauses that prevent vets from setting up independent clinics near their former corporate employers.

Examine whether certain fee structures and cross-selling practices are truly in the public interest.

Alternative Ownership Models

If we don’t want vet med to be a binary choice between sell to private equity and struggle alone, we need more options:

Employee-owned practices or co-ops.

Regional federations of independent clinics that share back-office functions without surrendering control.

Partnerships with mission-aligned investors willing to accept reasonable, rather than maximal, returns.

Private equity has shown what can be done with capital and focus. The challenge now is to build models that apply that discipline without sacrificing the soul of the profession.

A Final Word to Vets and Pet Owners

For veterinarians and nurses, the private-equity takeover can feel like a tide you cannot swim against.

For pet owners, it can be almost invisible, until the bill arrives.

This blog is not an argument for panic, but for attention.