German industrial giant ThyssenKrupp's elevator business changed hands.
To save the company's downturn, on February 27, ThyssenKrupp decided to sell the elevator business to a joint consortium of Advent and Cinven for € 17.2 billion.
This is about 10% higher than the previous market's estimated price of 15.5 billion to 16 billion euros.
ThyssenKrupp will use its 1.25 billion euros to buy a minority stake in the elevator business. Other sales proceeds are used to improve the company's financial and debt pressures, especially the steel business, which has severely dragged down the company's profits.
According to the financial report for the first quarter of fiscal 2020 (October 1, 2019-December 31, 2019), ThyssenKrupp's EBIT was 50 million euros, a sharp decline of 76.96% year-on-year.
Among them, the EBIT of the elevator business was 228 million euros, which is the company's most attractive business. The European steel business suffered a loss of 164 million euros. Compared with the previous quarter, the loss increased by 2.64 times.
The above transaction is expected to be completed on June 30 this year.
ThyssenKrupp was formed by the reorganization of Thyssen and Krupp in 1999. Its business covers steel, automation, materials and engineering. Both Thyssen and Krupp have a long history. The former was founded in 1871 and the latter was founded in 1811.
ThyssenKrupp, with a glorious history of more than 200 years, has finally taken the road of "a long time must be divided".
Its recent transformation has lasted about nine years. It started with the "de-steelization" of the Helsingen era, and then split the company into two materials companies and industrial companies. business.
Since July 2018, ThyssenKrupp has fallen into performance and personnel turmoil due to the spin-off, which has lasted for nearly two years. Among them, the radical shareholder Cevian, who owns 18% of ThyssenKrupp, played a key role.
The demands of radical shareholders on stock prices and earnings can't wait for the Big Mac to slowly transform and improve performance.
In May 2019, ThyssenKrupp's plan to merge European steel business with India's Tata failed to pass EU antitrust review. Since then, selling the most valuable elevator business has become a choice for ThyssenKrupp.
At present, the elevator giants in the world's first echelon are Otis of the United States, Schindler of Switzerland, Mitsubishi Electric of Japan, Kone of Finland and ThyssenKrupp.
Earlier, the Finnish elevator giant planned to spend 17 billion euros to acquire ThyssenKrupp's elevator business. The takeover offer triggered a strong reaction from Swiss Schindler, who believed that the merger threatened its survival and declared that it would take antitrust lawsuits to hinder the merger of the two powers.
According to Reuters, Cevian, also a private equity fund, does not want ThyssenKrupp's elevator business to fall into the hands of other private equity wealth managers. This radical second shareholder with the title of "Capital Butcher" is more inclined to merge with KONE to exert business synergy.
But KONE finally ended on February 17th. Two private equity consortiums entered the final competition: one composed of Blackstone Fund, Carlyle Group and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Committee; the other was jointly led by Anhong Capital and Shengfeng Capital.
The CEO of ThyssenKrupp Elevator Business is Peter Walker, who has been responsible for the company's elevator business since December 2018. At that time, ThyssenKrupp's management was in a turbulent situation and was implementing a "one-for-two" spin-off plan.
The 58-year-old Australian, born in Sydney, will lead an elevator team with more than 50,000 employees and an annual revenue of 8 billion euros, opening a new chapter after the change of ownership.