Sykes Seafood is a family-run business dating back to 1862 and is best known for supplying warm water shrimp to the UK food and catering industries. Tony McDonough reports

A 158-year-old Merseyside seafood company has acquired a firm in the Netherlands, creating a €300m Pan-European seafood business.

Sykes Seafood is a family-run business dating back to 1862 and is best known for supplying warm water shrimp to the UK food and catering industries. It operates a processing facility in Maghull and a another site at Manchester’s New Smithfield Market.

It specialises in picking and dispatching products to provide quality control in the supply chain. Sykes also has an international reach, with joint ventures agreed with numerous factories and facilities overseas.

Zeus Capital  acted as exclusive financial adviser to Sykes on its acquisition of Klaas Puul from the Dutch Seafood Company (DSC) and H2 Equity Partners. The complex transaction involved multiple stakeholders across Europe.

The combined business will offer customers across Europe a wide range of high-quality products in chilled and frozen formats for the Retail, Foodservice and Manufacturing sectors.

Klaas Puul is one of the largest shrimp processors in Europe with operations in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Morocco. The company has more than 3,500 employees with annual revenues of €130m. The business was part of DSC, a portfolio company of H2 Equity Partners.

Alan Dale, managing director at Sykes Seafood, said: “The combination of Sykes and Klaas Puul is something that is very exciting to us as it gives us a platform to conclude further Pan-European deals with our core customers and also gives us the additional production capacity that we desperately needed in order to grow our sales.”

The transaction was led by Zeus Capital’s corporate finance team, split across both its London and Manchester offices, The team, led by Gareth Davies and Richard Hughes, have advised Sykes Seafood on an ongoing basis for the past two years, and provided financial advice to Sykes throughout the acquisition process.

Zeus is a leading adviser to mid-cap private and public companies, and has been prolific across the public and private markets in recent years, acting on 143 transactions that have raised a total of £6.3bn.