[United has been at the forefront of a wave of consolidation in the rental market for construction and industrial equipment]
Woke up this morning to take a look at the FT, and a piece about construction rentals caught my eye as it was illustrated by a picture of a vehicle from Sunbelt Rentals, an outfit which seems to be getting steadily more visible here in the UK, here in Epsom even.
Taking a look, I find one piece saying that Sunbelt is owned by the Aperion Group (reference 3) and then a company called Ashtead (reference 2) which also claims to own it. Ashtead look to be a much better fit. But I suppose the Sunbelt brand could have an owner who chooses to franchise chunks of the operation out, probably geographical chunks, to others - thus confusing the ownership structure as seen by the man-in-the-street, that is to say me.
Ashtead is a publicly listed company with shares trading at around £50, while Aperion is the investment vehicle of one Christian Angermayer. I dare say it would be easy enough to find out something about him. In the meantime, his website is decorated with soft focus images of ancient artefacts from the Mediterranean region.
How United Rentals, Herc and H&E fit into this, if at all, also remains unknown. Other than that Herc was a spin-off from Hertz - a once prominent car rental operation, now not so prominent.
[Ex Reddit. Type 96A main battle tanks of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Ground Force]
Much more depressing, I read at reference 4 in Friday's Guardian (paper format), that while in the last 20 years or so Europe has increased its defence spending by 25%, for the US we have 66%, Russia near 300% and China near 600%. Which makes Europe look very weak compared with the three big powers, all three of which are behaving aggressively - and all those tanks are not just there for show - as we learned after the massive Russian build up on their long border with the Ukraine. This despite Europe being very rich. Rich pickings, maybe.
Maybe it would suit all three big powers for Europe to be weak. Their top table is quite crowded enough already.
Maybe we are going to have to put all those new hospitals and all those foreign holidays on hold for a bit. If the Russians can put up with pouring so much of their treasure into defence - aka war - I guess we are going to have to match them - and the United Nations is pretty much an irrelevance.
Or do we snatch at the latest communiqué from the Trump Tower? For which see reference 5.
Trusting to the Guardian and its reputation, I have not attempted to check the figures used by Wintour. Not have I attempted to check that the tanks are what they say they are - or even thought around how I might go about that.
Oddly, earlier, too lazy to walk downstairs and get my copy of the Guardian, I tried to find the article in question by search on my laptop, with neither open search with Bing nor search within the Guardian website turning it up. Maybe I do not subscribe enough to the Guardian to get an effective search function. In any event, I ended up walking downstairs.
References
Reference 1: Herc gatecrashes United Rental’s H&E takeover with $5.3bn bid: Rival bid for H&E follows wave of consolidation in heavy equipment rental industry in recent years - James Fontanella-Khan, Oliver Barnes, Financial Times - 2025.
Reference 2: https://www.ashtead-group.com/.
Reference 3: https://apeiron-investments.com/.
Reference 4: A failure to Trump-proof: Europe only has itself to blame over its Ukraine humiliation - Patrick Wintour, Guardian - 2025.
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