Eaton agrees to buy COL Group from Oaktree for €810 million

Eaton has agreed to acquire COL Group, the Italian maker of medium-voltage electrical distribution equipment, from Oaktree for €810 million ($919.2 million), a transaction the industrial group expects to close in the first quarter of 2027. Data Center Dynamics reported the agreement on September 29, noting that Eaton had announced the signing a week earlier.

COL sits in the link between a utility's substation and the racks inside the hall, manufacturing medium-voltage switchgear—including a sulfur hexafluoride-free line—along with grid automation technology and modular power systems. Founded in 1920, the company employs about 400 people across plants in Turin, Milan, Bergamo and Catania, and Eaton says COL has forecast sales of €250 million ($283.7 million) for 2027.

That forecast puts the headline price at roughly 3.2 times expected revenue, and because no earnings figure is disclosed, the multiple that matters most in industrial equipment—the one struck on EBITDA—cannot be worked out from what the parties have released. A business with 400 employees and four plants is a manufacturing acquisition as much as a technology one, and the published terms say little about margin or about the consents and clearances that sit in the gap between signing and closing.

The sale ends a hold Oaktree began in 2021, when the investment firm acquired COL, and places the asset on an industrial balance sheet rather than in a listing. Francesco Giuliani, a managing director in Oaktree's power opportunities group, described a partnership with COL and its founding family that built, on what he called a century of engineering heritage, a market leader in grid infrastructure products and services, and he pointed to a broader portfolio, wider geographic reach and a deeper engineering team as why the company is positioned to capture grid investment momentum, with Eaton as the partner to carry that forward. The 2021 purchase price is not disclosed, so no return can be calculated from the published terms, and the process that produced this buyer is not described.

Eaton, founded in 1911, already supplies power systems to data centers, UPS equipment among them. Omar Zaire, who runs Eaton's EMEA corporate and electrical sector, called COL's technologies, manufacturing capabilities and engineering expertise complementary to Eaton's European power distribution platform, tying the deal to utility and data center customers' need for resilient, sustainable power infrastructure and integrated grid-to-chip power solutions. Calogero Saeli, COL's chief executive, called joining Eaton an important milestone for the company and a significant opportunity for its employees, customers and partners, with grid modernization and electrification as the work ahead.

Eaton frames the deal as European capacity as much as technology: the acquisition, Eaton says, expands its European power distribution capabilities and manufacturing footprint, a claim about where gear gets built as well as what it does, and the purchase includes four Italian plants with about 400 employees.

PWD has argued that grid access has become the asset and generation a derivative of permission, and Eaton's purchase sits one layer beneath that claim, in the equipment that turns an interconnection into usable load. Switchgear, automation and modular power are what a project must have before it can be energized, and the pool of suppliers is narrower than the pool of projects drawing on it, so buying COL hands Eaton European medium-voltage manufacturing capacity and a product line that competes for specification at the point electrical design tends to be locked. The same logic ran through Sydney, where Goodman's 135MW Apollo project cleared planning without a tenant, testing whether queue position outranks a signed lease.

Eaton has been assembling this position in public: in August, Eaton and Trane paired power and cooling in a single reference design for AI data centers, with the two companies claiming a 15 percent reduction in energy use and an 80 percent cut in copper. A reference design is a specification play that steers builders toward a preferred set of electrical and thermal components; it makes the component list a place where a supplier can gain ground before ground is broken, and a European switchgear manufacturer adds to what Eaton can put in that package.

Eaton states its demand case as growing customer demand across data center and utility markets, the two end markets it cites. If the binding constraint on that buildout turns out to be generation, interconnection or the switchgear itself, the component layer is where a small group of suppliers meets a large group of buyers, and where buying capacity is quicker than building it.

The number that would settle whether the price was right—COL's profitability—is still missing. Eaton has published a sales forecast and nothing on margin, and that forecast describes 2027, the year the deal is expected to close rather than a full year of ownership. A price at that multiple implies the buyer expects volume growth in European medium-voltage demand, margin expansion, or both; Eaton's first full year of disclosure on the acquired business is where that assumption gets tested.