Qalaa Holdings Chairman and Founder Ahmed Heikal
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ASEC Cement, a business unit of Qalaa Holdings reached financial close today on the sale of its holdings in subsidiaries ASEC Minya Cement and ASEC Ready Mix Company to Misr Cement Qena.
The deal is valued at about 1bn Egyptian pounds.
“Both ASEC Minya and ASEC Ready Mix have established themselves as critical players in the vital Upper Egyptian market, and we are honored to have worked with an exceptional management team at each of them to build them into the companies they are today,” Qalaa Holdings Chairman and Founder Ahmed Heikal said.
The sale of ASEC Minya & Ready-mix will result in a total of about 940 million Egyptian pounds in debt being deconsolidated at the ASEC Cement consolidated level.
Qalaa had announced on 1 November that it had signed a sale and purchase agreement for the transaction.
Qalaa business unit Gozour signed a sale and purchase agreement earlier in November to divest confectioner Rashidi El Mizan.
Qalaa Holdings is focussing on deleveraging at the holding and platform company levels; acquiring additional stakes in key platform companies and selective investments within existing platform companies. The company will also continue to study opportunities for share buybacks so long as its shares trade at a significant discount to their fair market value.
ASEC Minya Cement is an Egyptian cement producer located in Upper Egypt. It began commercial operations in August 2013 with a name plate capacity of 2m tonnes par annum. ASEC Ready Mix is a producer and distributor of ready-mix concrete. It operates six batch plants in Upper Egypt with production in in the 2014 fiscal year reaching 382,000 cubic meters.
At the time of sale, ASEC Cement held 46.5 per cent of ASEC Minya Cement and 55 per cent of ASEC Ready Mix. Qalaa and its subsidiary National Development and Trading Company (“NDT”) together own 70 per cent of ASEC Cement.
CI Capital Investment Banking was financial advisor and Arab Legal Consultants (ALC) served as Legal advisors to Qalaa on the transaction.