SCC parent Rigby Group’s regional airports quest was always intended to be temporary, its Co-CEO has stressed following its sale of Regional & City Airports (RCA).
Rigby Group this week announced it has offloaded RCA to FTSE 100 firm ICG – its third major buy-and-build sale of over £100m and second over £200m.
It first invested in the airports sector in 2013 when it acquired Exeter Airport.
According to Rigby Group’s latest annual report, it has grown to become its second-largest arm behind only SCC, generating £112.6m revenues in its fiscal 2024 (compared with the IT resell powerhouse’s £3.44bn haul).
The sale follows SCC’s recent move to divest two of its datacentres, and comes after Rigby Group sold the bulk of its Nuvias business to Infinigate in 2022.
In a LinkedIn post (see bottom), Rigby Group Co-CEO Steve Rigby said Rigby Group’s track record of buying, building and then selling businesses in various sectors “isn’t luck”, but rather “a combination of hard work, intelligent acquisition, clear strategic goals and backing great teams”.
“We have a further £100m+ of deals in the making in our portfolio,” he wrote.
Expanding on this in a two-minute video accompanying the post, Rigby said the group’s time in airports gave it “both intellectual reward and pride, and also a substantial financial reward”.
Passenger numbers for the business currently stand at around 2.5 million, a figure that is set to grow to 3.5 million in the coming years, he said.
“It was always our intention to build the assets and to later sell them,” he said.
What’s left?
So what is Rigby Group left with following the divestment?
Besides SCC, its Rigby Group Technology Investments arm turned over £92m in fiscal 2024. It owns converged comms distributor Nuvias UC – which ranked 17th in Oxygen’s Must-Know IT Distributors 2024 – as well as MSP buy-and-build CloudClevr – which ranked 157th in Oxygen 250 2025.
Rigby Group also owns two smaller businesses focused on hotels (£17.1m revenues) and real estate (£3.7m revenues).
Rigby Group set about the full sale of its airports business in early 2024 after a partial divestment stalled during the pandemic, Rigby revealed.
“In business, when you set out on a journey, sometimes you can’t appreciate just how critical it will become,” Rigby wrote.
“Other times you have a clear plan and objectives. Our time in the airports business was definitely the latter. We had a definite intent to build the leading small regional airport brand in the UK.”
