Heidelberg-Cement puts Hanson UK up for sale for £1bn 26 May, 2009 | By Nick Whitten German firm Heidelberg has put its UK cement division Hanson up for sale for a reported £1 billion. According to the Daily Mail Heidelberg-Cement is understood to have started sounding out potential bidders at the start of the month and has appointed Frankfurt-based Commerzbank to handle the sale. Heidelberg bought Hanson Global for £7.8 billion in 2007. The firm employs 6,500 people in the UK and has 350 sites. The purchase left Heidelberg with debts of £5.3 billion, which have become more difficult to service with the severe downturn in construction. The firm is owned by the family of Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who committed suicide in January. It announced this month its intention to sell £1.7 billion of assets to help pay back the banks. Hanson UK is expected to be broken up instead of being sold to one bidder. It has four divisions - aggregates and asphalt, concrete, building products and cement. Holcim snaps up Cemex's Australian operations for £988m 15 June, 2009 | By Nick Whitten Holcim today announced it is buying the Australian operations of Cemex for £988 million. Holcim said it would pay A$2.02 billion (£988 million) for the Australian operations, which involve almost 350 facilities producing ready-mix concrete, aggregates and concrete pipes across the country. The sale confirms speculation that the Swiss company would exploit problems among some highly indebted rivals. The deal also involves Cemex’s 25 per cent stake in Cement Australia, a producer in which Holcim already owns 50 per cent. Cemex has grown rapidly in recent years to become the world’s third biggest manufacturer, but has taken on large quantities of debt, prompting and asset and debt reduction programme. Cemex Australia had sales of A$1.86 billion (£910 million) last year and profits before interest, tax and depreciation of A$313 million (£153 million). The move by Holcim is slightly at odds with a trend that has been developing in the global cement industry that has seen the major cement players looking to sell off assets and divisions to small local rivals. Heidelberg has come out and said it wants to sell its UK assets with the smart money on Hanson being offloaded on a piecemeal basis. According to Nash Fitzwilliams’ construction M&A specialist, Adrian Pritchard, the trend is the opposite of what would normally be expected. He said: “It is fascinating to see the situation unfolding in the global cement sector as you don’t often see industries fragmenting, it is almost always consolidation.”
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