Businessman Lutz Stache, who sold the Simcor Oradea group in anover 50 million-euro deal last year and who has a regional businessworth more than 700 million euros and employing 10,000 people inthe constructions industry, says that Simcor is one of his mostprofitable businesses ever, and that results in Romania were higherthan planned.
For the first time before the press in Romania, after not havinggiven interviews for a number of years, Lutz Stache announced thetakeover of the lime business of ArcelorMittal Galati andinvestments that will amount to 40 million euros. He also revealedthat he had bought shares in Remedia, the pharmaceuticaldistributor and retailer.
The German-born businessman came in Romania eighteen years ago,brought by the former chairman and shareholder of the Simcor groupMihai Voiculescu, and has invested 50 to 100 million euros eversince.
"We took over the lime factory from ArcerlorMittal and theentire output will go to the company. We have already begun theinvestment programme, which entails building a new facility fromscratch, as the previous one was really old," Stache said.
The investment will be completed in two years, after which thelime business should generate 35-40 million-euro sales. Until then,the entrepreneur expects 6 to 7 million euros in revenues a year.The acquisition was made through AHG Simcor Industry SRL.
Industry remains one of the fields where he will continue toinvest, though he did not provide further details about his plans.Asked whether he intended to follow in the footsteps of Voiculescu,who invested 2 million euros in buying 60 apartments in Berlin,Lutz said, "he brought me here, which is why we will always bedoing something together in the future."
The German businessman admits that had he sold this year, hewould not have got the same price; still, he sold because "it wasmuch too tempting". The new owner of Simcor is Macon Deva, held byEnterprise Investors.
"I've lived through a number of crises. The first was in Germanyin 1994 when the constructions business started to dwindle by 20 to30% a year. Four years later in Poland, I sold two factories ontime. The third I sold too late. I know the Romanian market verywell and when demand doubled in five years I realised it was notnormal. I felt there would be a recoil judging by statistics," LutzStache says.
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