Lutz Stache takes over ArcelorMittal Galati's lime business

Businessman Lutz Stache, who sold the Simcor Oradea group in an over 50 million-euro deal last year and who has a regional business worth more than 700 million euros and employing 10,000 people in the constructions industry, says that Simcor is one of his most profitable businesses ever, and that results in Romania were higher than planned.

For the first time before the press in Romania, after not having given interviews for a number of years, Lutz Stache announced the takeover of the lime business of ArcelorMittal Galati and investments that will amount to 40 million euros. He also revealed that he had bought shares in Remedia, the pharmaceutical distributor and retailer.

The German-born businessman came in Romania eighteen years ago, brought by the former chairman and shareholder of the Simcor group Mihai Voiculescu, and has invested 50 to 100 million euros ever since.

“We took over the lime factory from ArcerlorMittal and the entire output will go to the company. We have already begun the investment programme, which entails building a new facility from scratch, as the previous one was really old,” Stache said.

The investment will be completed in two years, after which the lime 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 to invest, 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 be doing something together in the future.”

The German businessman admits that had he sold this year, he would not have got the same price; still, he sold because “it was much too tempting”. The new owner of Simcor is Macon Deva, held by Enterprise Investors.

“I’ve lived through a number of crises. The first was in Germany in 1994 when the constructions business started to dwindle by 20 to 30% a year. Four years later in Poland, I sold two factories on time. The third I sold too late. I know the Romanian market very well and when demand doubled in five years I realised it was not normal. I felt there would be a recoil judging by statistics,” Lutz Stache says.