Dog Dialogue

Why is our vet care now so expensive??

What’s actually happening in Australia

EQT (a Swedish private equity firm) acquired VetPartners in January 2025, creating a 267-clinic network employing more than 1,300 veterinarians.  Greencross was acquired by US private equity firm TPG Capital (55%) in 2019, with a 45% stake held by AustralianSuper.  So foreign corporate control of Australian vet practices is already a significant and growing reality.

Effect on service costs

The evidence from comparable markets is stark. In the US, where corporations and private equity now control somewhere between 30–50% of all veterinary clinics (up from less than 10% a decade ago), this “roll-up” strategy has resulted in price hikes of up to 100% for routine services while reducing competition and service quality. 

The mechanism is straightforward: once a corporate group dominates a region, competition disappears and prices rise. The scale achieved through consolidation intensifies bargaining power with suppliers and accelerates protocol standardisation  — which can cut costs internally, but those savings don’t necessarily flow to clients.

Effect on tax returning to Australia

This is where it gets murky, and frankly concerning. Foreign-owned corporations have several legitimate (and some aggressive) tools to reduce Australian tax liability:

Profit repatriation — companies can transfer profits back to parent companies via dividends, interest payments, royalties, transfer pricing, and branch profit arrangements. Each method has its own withholding tax implications, but the net effect is that a significant portion of profits leaves Australia rather than circulating in the economy. 

Debt loading / thin capitalisation — foreign private equity commonly uses related party financing arrangements to reduce Australian income tax, and may facilitate migration of assets such as intellectual property to offshore related parties in jurisdictions with effectively low taxation.  Essentially: a foreign parent loans money to the Australian subsidiary at high interest rates, the Australian entity claims those interest payments as tax deductions, and the “interest” flows offshore tax-free or at low rates.

Australia has tightened the rules — new thin capitalisation rules now apply to income years starting 1 July 2023, and debt deduction creation rules from 1 July 2024, specifically to limit multinationals’ ability to reduce Australian taxable income through internal debt arrangements.  These are real improvements, but enforcement is ongoing and complex.

The bottom line

When a foreign corporation buys Australian vet practices:

• Prices for clients almost certainly rise over time as competition is eliminated and profit extraction becomes the priority.
• More money leaves Australia — even if corporate tax is paid here at the 30% rate, profits repatriated via dividends, IP royalties, or management fees reduce what actually stays in the Australian economy.
• Local reinvestment decisions are made offshore, meaning community-level decisions (staffing, wages, clinic closures) are driven by international investor returns, not local need.
• Wages for vets and nurses can be squeezed even as consumer prices rise, because the corporate margin extraction happens on both ends.

The UK has gone furthest in scrutinising this — the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal market investigation into veterinary consolidation after finding that six large corporate groups now own around 60% of UK vet practices.  Australia hasn’t reached that level of scrutiny yet, but the trajectory is similar.

So international corporations are now buying up Aussie vet practices 😡
And you wonder why the cost of vet care has increased so much!
Check who owns the vet practice you use!