LONDON: Amcomri Group plc (AIM: AMCO), the UK and Ireland-focused specialist engineering and industrial manufacturing group built on a “Buy, Improve, Build” strategy, has confirmed the sale of its adhesive tape subsidiary Premier Limpet Limited to Dalpo Group UK Limited, part of Poland’s Dalpo Poznań sp. z o.o.
The headline numbers are striking: a minimum upfront price tag of £10.1 million, with the possibility of more to come. Amcomri stands to receive an additional payout worth 0.9 times any trading EBITDA above £1.4 million that Premier Limpet generates in the year to 31 December 2026, according to a statement.
Once debt was repaid, the Group walked away with roughly £7 million in net cash from the deal.
From £2.95 Million to a 28x Return
The sale caps off a five-year turnaround story. Amcomri originally bought Premier Limpet in August 2021 for £2.95 million — and only a small slice of that, £0.25 million, came out of the company’s own cash reserves, with the rest financed through asset-based lending. A further £1.15 million in deferred consideration was later paid out of the tape maker’s own operating cash flow under an earn-out arrangement.
Set against net initial cash proceeds of around £7 million, that works out to roughly a 28-times return on invested capital — a number the Board is holding up as proof that its investment model works.
How Premier Limpet Got There
When Amcomri first acquired Premier Limpet, it saw a business with plenty of room to grow but plenty of untapped potential too. The company’s Business Process Improvement team went to work overhauling how the business priced and costed its products, tightened up working capital, and brought in a new management team with deeper experience in the tape sector.
That new leadership then spotted a gap in the product line and pushed Premier Limpet into water-activated adhesive paper tapes — a fast-growing corner of the market. To move quickly, the company acquired the trade and assets of Supreme Tapes and Converting Ltd in March 2024, instantly gaining an established supply chain and customer base rather than building one from scratch. The Supreme business was folded into Premier Limpet’s Cambridge site.
Together, these moves steadily lifted both gross margins and overall profitability in the years following the original deal.
Why Sell Now
With the business transformed, Amcomri’s Board decided the moment was right to hand Premier Limpet over to a buyer with deeper sector muscle. Dalpo is a major European player in printed and plain adhesive tape, and the Board sees it as well placed to push the business further than Amcomri could on its own.
For Amcomri, the proceeds aren’t just a one-off win — they’re fuel for the next phase of growth. The Group plans to redeploy the cash into fresh acquisitions of specialist engineering and industrial businesses that fit the same “Buy, Improve, Build” mould: solid companies with room to improve. Amcomri also confirmed that the wider Group continues to trade in line with market expectations.
The Business Behind the Deal
Premier Limpet is the UK’s largest independent manufacturer of printed and plain adhesive tape, shipping around 40 million square metres of tape a year through its distributor network. It runs two manufacturing sites, in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, producing bespoke printed tapes across a range of materials and adhesive types.
Financially, the business had been holding steady: for the year ended 31 December 2025, it posted revenues of approximately £11.6 million, unchanged from 2024. Profit before tax came in at about £0.71 million, down from £1 million the year before, with net assets of roughly £0.7 million at year-end.
Hugh Whitcomb, Chief Executive Officer of Amcomri, commented: “The Disposal of Premier Limpet to a strategic European purchaser, demonstrates the success of Amcomri’s ‘Buy, Improve, Build’ model, and our ability to systematically develop the latent opportunities that can exist in niche manufacturing and engineering SME businesses.
“At the time of acquisition in 2021, our key objectives were to both gain scale and demonstrate that, through application of our model, we could effectively ‘break the SME plateau’ of performance that mature SME’s often reach.
“Following the successful implementation of our model over the last five years by the Premier Limpet team, supported by our Group Business Improvement team, the Board has determined that now is the optimum time to realise an exceptional return for its shareholders.
“Dalpo’s sector experience and coverage are an excellent fit for the next stage of Premier Limpet’s development, and we wish Mateusz Rawecki and the Dalpo team well in this next chapter and their entry into the UK market.
“Finally, we would like to thank Martin Hutchings, Nic Leslie and the whole Premier Limpet team for their contribution, commitment and dedication to the business, and wish them every success as part of the wider Dalpo organisation.”
