The acquisition of this leading wireless technology provider has been agreed at approximately £2.8 million. And we look forward to welcoming the company into the Petards Group portfolio.

Welcoming the Affini Group

Petards Group has a clear and established strategy to grow both organically and by acquisition, and this has been further strengthened by the procurement of Affini, a profitable and cash generative business. 

The acquisition will bring benefits that are highly complementary to the Group and in-line with the key tenets of existing strategy, which includes: 

• a focus on core products which are used in the rail, defence and traffic industries. Affini currently offers critical communication to the defence sector. The acquisition will provide a step change in the scale of our critical communication capabilities particularly in the aviation, and energy markets;

• investment in developing technologies to enhance our product portfolio: the acquisition broadens our product portfolio and provides Affini with the opportunity to cross sell its enhanced offering to our enlarged customer base;

• increasing revenues both organically by exploiting the synergies within Petards and by acquisition: the acquisition will increase our recurring revenues; 

• expanding revenues globally into our target markets: Petards’ target markets are the rail, defence and traffic industries: Affini operates in similar industries being the transport, blue light, energy, defence and construction sectors;

• improving operating margins through cost management.

Affini delivers major infrastructure communication projects in the UK and is a highly complementary business and will be a good cultural fit with the existing team. It has an experienced executive leadership team, who are remaining with the business with strong engineering expertise, consistent business values and principles, an aligned commercial approach and comparable operational procedures. 

Getting to know Affini 

Affini is a UK based critical communications solutions provider to the transport, blue light, energy defence and construction sectors. Affini’s expertise covers the entire life cycle, enabling it to offer an end-to-end service from strategy and design to maintenance and service management.

Affini delivers voice, video and data communication solutions alongside telematics, telemetry and asset/people tracking services. Its revenue is principally derived from project work, consultancy, maintenance and managed services, the latter generating recurring revenues and embedding customer relationships. Affini supplies services to a number of blue chip clients, with many customer relationships spanning 10 years or more.

The Affini business originates from 1974 when the radio division of the organisation that formed British Airways was carved out as a separate business. Historically, Affini’s core capability was the design, deployment and ongoing maintenance of critical communications networks within the aviation sector. The foundation of these solutions focused on radio technologies, for both landside and airside Private Mobile Radio (PMR) networks as well as ground to air communications within airports.

Following a strategic decision in 2019, Affini has targeted new markets where its skillset can be deployed and where high barriers to entry and operation exist and it has subsequently entered new sectors including in 2019 – blue light (fire and rescue), in 2020 – construction and nuclear and in 2021 – defence.

Affini is headquartered at offices near Heathrow and operates from three principal sites across the UK.