Corporate Greed (Part 7): The takeover of vet med in Europe (#470)

Looking up the ownership structure of your local vet clinic in Europe may be complicated.

It's likely that your clinic is part of a sprawling European portfolio, controlled not by the people working in the building, but by private equity funds in London, Stockholm and New York, or by global conglomerates whose real business is pet food, junk food for people, and financial engineering.

Just as in Australia [see Corporate Greed (Part 4) in this series], this is less a tale of good owners versus bad owners, and more a story about:

What happens when a caring profession is re-imagined as an asset class?

The First Big Wave: Independent Vetcare / IVC Evidensia

Europe’s modern corporatization story starts with Independent Vetcare (IVC) in the UK.

• In 2014, growth equity investor Summit Partners took a majority growth equity stake in IVC to accelerate its buy-and-build strategy in small-animal practice.

• In 2016, Swedish private-equity fund EQT VI acquired IVC from Summit, explicitly to drive further acquisitive growth.

IVC later merged with Evidensia (a Nordic roll-up) to become IVC Evidensia, now the largest veterinary group in Europe with around 2,500 clinics and hospitals in 20 countries across Europe and North America.

The current shareholder list reads like the guest list at a private equity conference:

• EQT Private Equity - majority owner.

• Silver Lake - major technology-focused PE investor.

• Silver Lake joined as a new minority investor in 2021, not at the time of the original EQT acquisition.

• Nestlé Purina PetCare - strategic minority (pet-food giant).

• Berkshire Partners and other institutional investors as additional backers.

According to an EQT press release in 2021, this shareholder group injected €3.5 billion of new capital, valuing IVC at about €12.3 billion and positioning it for a possible London IPO.

In other words: a network born out of small UK practices now sits at the center of a multibillion-euro private equity deal, spanning 20 countries.

The Second Wave: AniCura and Mars Petcare

In parallel, another roll-up was taking shape in the Nordics: AniCura.

• Established in 2011 as one of the first mergers of companion-animal hospitals in the region.

• Backed and grown by Nordic Capital and Fidelio Capital, classic European private equity funds.

AniCura expanded into a pan-European group of ~450–500 hospitals and clinics across 15–17 countries, caring for several million pets annually.

In 2018, Nordic Capital sold AniCura to Mars Petcare in one of the largest vet-care deals globally - widely reported in the €1–2 billion range.

Mars is not private equity. It’s a privately owned (i.e., family owned) global conglomerate.

But from the clinic floor, the effect can look similar:

Decisions about your local hospital are now made in boardrooms whose core businesses include chocolate bars, pet food, and insurance.

AniCura now sits inside Mars Veterinary Health, alongside global brands like VCA, Banfield and BluePearl.

The Big Six in the UK, and Who’s Behind Them

Nowhere in Europe illustrates the corporate story more starkly than the UK.

A decade ago, roughly 10% of UK practices were corporate.

Today, around 60% are controlled by just six groups - the so-called Big Six: IVC Evidensia, CVS Group, Medivet, Pets at Home Vet Group, Linnaeus, and VetPartners.

Here’s what sits behind those friendly logos:

• IVC Evidensia

• Built and owned by EQT (private equity) with later investments from Silver Lake (private equity) and Nestlé Purina, plus other institutional funds.

• Medivet 

• Controlled by CVC Capital Partners VIII, a global private equity firm that acquired a majority stake in 2021 in a deal reported at >£1 billion.

• VetPartners

• Founded in 2015, sold in 2018 to private equity fund BC Partners at a reported valuation of about £720 million.

  
  

• Under BC’s ownership it has expanded to around 850 sites and is now being groomed for a multi-billion-pound exit.

• CVS Group Public Limited Company

• Went public on Alternative Investment Exchange (AIM) in 2007 after early backing from Sovereign Capital, a UK private equity house that helped build its initial roll-up.

• Today it is a listed company, but its shareholder base is dominated by institutional investors and specialist funds rather than practicing vets.

• Pets at Home Vet Group (Vets4Pets / Companion Care)

• Pets at Home, originally bought by KKR (private equity) in 2010, in turn acquired Vets4Pets in 2013 and merged it with its Companion Care JV practices.

• Result: roughly 440+ JVP practices, many inside Pets at Home stores, in a hybrid corporate / joint-venture model.

• Linnaeus Group

• Built with the backing of Sovereign Capital Partners (private equity) and sold in 2018 to Mars Petcare, which now owns more than 150 Linnaeus clinics and referral hospitals in the UK.

  
  

By 2024–25, these six groups, driven or shaped by private equity and conglomerate capital, controlled the majority of first-opinion practices in the UK.

Continental Europe: Same Movie, New Subtitles

The same pattern is now playing out across the EU and wider Europe.

• IVC Evidensia across the continent

• IVC hasn’t stopped at the UK. It now operates across 20 countries, including the Nordics, Benelux, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and into Canada, under a simple playbook:

  
  

Acquire, consolidate, standardize.

• It is still owned and controlled by a private equity led consortium whose exit route is likely an IPO or trade sale at a much higher valuation than entry.

  
  

• AniCura - Nordic roll-up to Mars global platform

• AniCura began life as a Nordic consolidation vehicle backed by Nordic Capital and Fidelio Capital. In 2018 it became the vehicle for Mars Petcare’s strategic entry into European veterinary services.

• Today AniCura’s 450–500 clinics in 15–17 countries are part of Mars Veterinary Health’s global network, sharing corporate systems and strategy with thousands of clinics worldwide.

• VetPartners - private equity backed roll-up goes European

• What started as a UK group is now marketed as a pan-European veterinary platform:

  
  

  • Ownership: acquired by BC Partners (PE) in 2018.

    
    

  • Footprint: around 850 sites and 12,000 staff across the UK, Ireland, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Portugal.

    
    

  • BC Partners’ business is not running vet practices for their own sake; it is extracting high returns over a 4–7 year window before selling the platform on.

• Medivet - CVC’s veterinary platform

• Medivet is being built out as a multinational veterinary group, ultimately controlled by private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners VIII.

• CVC has a long history of healthcare deals and is now using Medivet as its primary platform in the UK and, increasingly, across parts of Europe.

• Other PE-backed regional groups

• The same pattern of private equity entry, roll-up and exit repeats at smaller scale:

  
  

• Dierenartsen Groep Nederland (DGN) - Dutch group of 26 clinics whose growth was backed by private equity firm Standard Investment before being sold to VetPartners (itself owned by BC Partners).

  
  

• Numerous country-level or regional groups (in Spain, Italy, Germany, Benelux, the Nordics and CEE) are being pieced together quietly, often with backing from local or mid-market private equity funds.

The details differ, but the pattern is the same:

Veterinary practice is being re-coded as a defensive, non-cyclical healthcare cashflow deserving of leveraged buyouts and aggressive growth targets.

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

Private-equity and corporate defenders will say - as they do in Australia - that they bring:

• Capital for new equipment and refurbishments.

  
  

• Professional HR, IT and compliance systems.

  
  

• Referral networks, 24-hour cover and internal CPD.

  
  

All of that can be true.

But the fund structure matters.

Private equity funds are designed to deliver outsized returns, usually within a decade:

• Buy or build a platform.

  
  

• Load it with acquisitions and debt.

  
  

• Drive Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA) up.

  
  

• Exit at a higher multiple to another fund, a conglomerate or the public markets.

  
  

When that model is applied at scale to a caring profession, a series of pressures follow:

1. Prices and value extraction

• The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has documented that vet prices rose about 60–63% between 2015–2016 and 2023, outpacing services inflation, during exactly the period when the Big Six were consolidating the market.

• Their working papers show that large corporate groups typically:

  
  

  • Charge more for similar procedures than independent practices.

    
    

  • Apply much higher mark-ups on medicines, with in-clinic prices often double online pharmacy prices.

    
    

  • Are less transparent about ownership and pricing, leaving clients unclear who they are really dealing with.

    
    

• The CMA’s proposed remedies - capping prescription fees, mandatory price lists, clear ownership disclosure - are essentially an attempt to retrofit consumer protection onto a market that has been financialized faster than it has been regulated.

2. Professional autonomy and moral distress

• Most corporate groups insist that clinical decisions remain with the vet.

• On paper, Yes.

• In practice, Not necessarily.

  
  

  • The line between clinical judgement and commercial imperative can blur, especially for younger vets on probation or in debt, when:

    
    

    • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and revenue targets hang over performance reviews.

      
      

    • Protocols, formularies and referral paths are written by head office.

      
      

    • There is subtle pressure to keep referrals, diagnostics and cremations in-network.

3. Loss of local ownership and diversity

• As IVC, AniCura/Mars, VetPartners, Medivet, CVS and others expand continental footprints, the number of truly independent clinics shrinks.

• That brings familiar consequences:

  
  

  • Fewer genuinely independent second opinions.

    
    

  • Less diversity in pricing and business models.

    
    

  • Decisions about rural services made in private equity committees far from the farms and villages affected.

    
    

• When nearly every clinic within driving distance belongs to a handful of platforms, shopping around becomes an illusion of choice.

  
  

Why This Is a Cautionary Tale, Not Just a Complaint

None of this means every corporate or private equity owned practice is bad, or that every independent is good.

There are corporate hospitals that invest heavily in staff, standards and charity work.

There are independents that underpay, under-equip and under-perform.

The issue is systemic:

• When most of a country’s veterinary capacity is owned or steered by a small number of financial vehicles, the risks scale up: pricing power, wage suppression, and pressure to monetize every interaction.

  
  

• When ownership is opaque, clients cannot easily reward clinics whose values align with their own, nor can regulators or journalists see the full picture.

  
  

Europe has seen similar films before in aged care, childcare, dentistry and pathology.

Vet med is simply the latest defensive growth sector in the private-equity playbook.

What Needs to Happen Next in Europe

If this is to remain a cautionary tale rather than a full-blown tragedy, several things need to change.

1. Radical transparency

• Ownership disclosure

  
  

  • Every clinic should disclose its ultimate beneficial owner (private equity fund, conglomerate, listed company, partnership) on its website, invoices and premises.

    
    

  • Price transparency: Standardized, easily comparable price lists for common procedures and medicines, as the CMA is now pushing towards in the UK.

2. Smarter regulation of consolidation

• Competition authorities in the UK and EU should track not only acquisitions, but the cumulative effect of repeated small deals that never individually trigger thresholds.

  
  

• Mergers that concentrate ownership at local or regional level should be callable for review even when small on paper - a principle already embraced in some French and UK cases.

  
  

3. Protecting genuine professional control

• Where countries require majority vet ownership, regulators must ensure this is real, not just token A-shares while control sits in management contracts and debt covenants.

  
  

• Professional bodies and the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe should articulate minimum standards for clinical autonomy, regardless of ownership model.

  
  

4. Space for alternatives

• If we don’t want a binary choice between sell to private equity or struggle alone:

  
  

  • Support employee-owned practices and regional federations of independents that share back-office functions.

    
    

  • Encourage mission-aligned investors willing to accept reasonable, not maximal, returns in exchange for preserving local control and access.

A Final Word to Vets and Pet Owners

For vets and nurses across Europe, the corporate wave can feel inevitable.

For pet owners, it can be almost invisible - until the bill arrives, or the vet you trusted suddenly moves on after another acquisition.

This blog is not an argument for nostalgia, or for freezing veterinary medicine in its 1980s form.

This blog is an argument for vigilance.

• Ask who owns your clinic.

  
  

• Support practices - independent or corporate - that are transparent, fair, and genuinely clinically led.

  
  

• As a profession, insist that efficiency gains do not come at the cost of integrity, access or well being.

  
  

Corporate greed only becomes unstoppable when we treat it as a law of nature.

Europe still has time to do something different.

But the time for action is NOW.

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