EURO AUCTIONS of Dromore has just sold for $1.1 billion (£790 m sterling).
Founded by Derek Keys and his brothers in the County Tyrone village in 1998, Euro Auctions conducts unreserved auctions of industrial plant, construction equipment and agricultural machinery across the globe.
The transaction has been approved by the Board of Directors of Ritchie Bros. and is expected to close in late 2021 or early 2022.
As part of the deal, Euro Auctions founder, Derek Keys will remain in the business for at least three years.
It is intended Johnnie Keys will assume a senior leadership position and Lynden and Trevor Keys will be retained as sourcing leads.
Euro Auctions claims to “hold more sales and sell more lots than any other auction house.”
Last year the company conducted 60 on site and online auctions selling close to 90,000 items for £484 million across its nine locations in Northern Ireland, the UK, Germany, Spain, the UAE, Australia and the USA.
Now, global asset management company, Ritchie Bros, has acquired the local company with an international presence for over a billion dollars.
Ritchie Bros. has a global network of 40 permanent auction sites in 15 countries around the globe. They help their customers buy and sell a wide range of used and new equipment for construction, mining transportation, oil and gas, agriculture and forestry equipment.
Worldwide in 2019, they sold 503,300 items to 112,190 buyers for 41,000 sellers for $5.1 billion.
The $1billion price tag paid for the Dromore company, is put into perspective when one understands that Ritchie Bros. first recorded annual equipment sales of $1bn in 1998, the same year it became a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange.
Ten years later, Ritchie Bros. sold $1bn of equipment in one quarter for the first time in 2008.
They went online as early as 2002, making it easier for buyers to participate in auctions all over the world in person or virtually.
Similar to Ritchie Bros, Euro Auctions also sells items through a timed auction format and a daily marketplace with ‘buy now’ and ‘make offer’ options.
“Dave Ritchie and his brothers were a big inspiration for my brothers and I in the creation of Euro Auctions,” Derek said, “We modelled much of what we do off Dave’s customer-centric philosophy, which still runs through Ritchie Bros.”
Euro Auctions is the trading name of Gardrum which held its first plant auction outside Northern Ireland in Yorkshire in 2000 and expanded to auctions at a number of permanent sites including Germany in 2006, followed by Brisbane in Australia, Spain, the US, Hong Kong and Dubai. In 2017, Euro Auctions acquired Yoder and Frey in Florida.
Started by three Ritchie Bros. in 1958, the first item sold by the fledgling auction business was a bench vice.
To this day, if there is a vice to be sold amongst the millions of dollars worth of stock to be auctioned that day, then the first item to be offered for sale at a Ritchie Bros. auction will be the vice.
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