KKR Tops Advent Bid With £4.1 Billion Offer for Spectris (3)

KKR & Co. agreed to buy Spectris Plc for £4.1 billion ($5.6 billion), surpassing an earlier bid for the British maker of precision testing equipment and software from a group led by Advent.

The offer values Spectris at about £40 per share, including £39.72 in cash and a 28 pence-per-share dividend, KKR said Wednesday. It’s 6.3% above the Advent bid and almost double Spectris’s share price on June 6, the last trading day before Bloomberg News reported Advent was weighing an offer. Spectris’s board backs KKR’s bid, the firm said.

The private equity firms have spent the last month tussling ...