Lasselsberger loses Cesarom and tile market domination

Austrian group Lasselsberger, one of the most solid family businesses on the European construction materials market, failed in its bid to indirectly take over the second largest producer of ceramic tiles on the Romanian market, Cesarom Bucharest.

The Austrians’ plans, with an estimated turnover of about 700 million euros, to build up an empire on the Romanian market by taking over the top two players, Sanex and Cesarom, failed in Budapest. The Austrians had already notified the Competition Council about this economic concentration movement, which was approved by the Romanian antitrust body through non-intervention decisions in both cases.

The two Romanian players jointly control about half of the Romanian ceramic tiles market, whose annual value is put at 110-115 million euros, with solid growth perspectives.

The public takeover offer that Lasselsberger launched on the Budapest bourse for the takeover of stock of Hungarian group Zalakeramia, the owner of Cesarom Bucharest, ended last week in failure. The Austrians, who held a 28.24% stake in Zalakeramia, increased their interest to 39.59%, with the Hungarian bank AEB refusing to sell the 56.28% stake that secures its control of the company. Altalanos Ertekforgalmi Bank (AEB) is supposedly held by Russian concern Gazprom, according to information released by the Hungarian press.

In the wake of this failure, Lasselsberger, which recently took over Sanex for 15-20 million euros, will change its expansion strategy for Romania and Hungary, where it states alternative solutions are available for reaching its objective.

“We have no comments concerning AEB’s unwillingness to sell. With regard to the effects of this outcome on our expansion strategy, we will continue to develop our operations there. We have various growth alternatives on the Hungarian and Romanian markets, such as greenfield projects or increased exports from other units of the group,” Daniel Romeyer, an executive with Lasselsberger, told Ziarul Financiar.
adrian.mirsanu@zf.ro