Street Talk

Johns Lyng’s share price dive will give KKR, EQT pause for thought

Sarah Thompson, Kanika Sood and Emma Rapaport

Mar 3, 2025 – 3.07pm

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Take-privates are difficult to pull off at the best of times. But when a company’s share price is languishing in the doghouse, the allure of a potential turnaround becomes hard to resist. That is doubly the case when the two buyout firms in question have already done most of the work.

This scenario is precisely where property services business Johns Lyng Group finds itself. Once a small-cap darling, Johns Lyng was one of February reporting season’s deepest underperformers, falling 31 per cent on the day it released its first-half results to a near five-year low of $2.53 per share.

Sarah Thompson has co-edited Street Talk since 2009, specialising in private equity, investment banking, M&A and equity capital markets stories. Prior to that, she spent 10 years in London as a markets and M&A reporter at Bloomberg and Dow Jones.

Kanika Sood is a journalist based in Sydney who writes for the Street Talk column.

Emma Rapaport is a co-editor of the Street Talk column. Prior to that, she was a markets reporter at The Australian Financial Review.