EQT wants to delist SUSE again

Swedish investment company EQT Private Equity plans to take SUSE private again. The company acquired SUSE in 2018 and took the company public in 2021 with an IPO in Frankfurt. EQT currently already owns 79 percent of the shares.

EQT Partners offers shareholders from SUSE for 16 euros per share without obligation. That is an additional price of approximately 67 percent compared to last Thursday’s closing price. Two years ago, during the IPO, a share price of 30 euros was requested. Shareholders may also keep their shares after the company has been delisted from the stock exchange. EQT expects this to happen in the last quarter of this year.

EQT and SUSE do not provide a concrete reason for the decision. The SUSE board says it supports the decision. “I believe in the strategic opportunity to take the company private is in place,” writes SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen. According to him, the move gives SUSE ‘the right environment’ to grow the company. SUSE says this allows it to ‘focus fully on operational priorities and the implementation of the long-term strategy’.

SUSE has been in the news several times in recent weeks. The company recently announced, among other things, that it will fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The German software developer did this because of the restrictions that Red Hat introduced regarding access to RHEL’s source code. SUSE also started an OpenELA foundation to “encourage the development of RHEL-compatible Linux distros.” The software company did this together with Oracle and Rocky Linux maker CIQ.