Israel’s Frutarom Industries has agreed to acquire French flavour house René Laurent for $21.3 million – its second acquisition of 2017.
The company manufactures a range of flavours and natural extracts, with sales in the year to March 2017 of $13.2 million. The company has two production sites – one each for sweet and savoury flavours – as well as an R&D centre near Cannes. As well as its business in France, it has activity in Morocco; René Laurent operates a production site near Casablanca, where natural herbal extracts activity is carried out for use in both natural flavours and antioxidants for food protection.
The business has a broad customer base in Europe, mainly in France, as well as in French speaking countries in Africa such as Morocco, Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire. It has a workforce of around 100 employees.
The deal comes after the $6.7 million buyout of South Africa’s Unique Flavors in February.
Frutarom president and CEO Ori Yehudai said: “The René Laurent acquisition is the first acquisition in the field of flavors made by Frutarom in the large and important French market and its first acquisition of a factory for plant extracts in Morocco. We intend to unite René Laurent’s R&D and sales and marketing platforms, in both the areas of sweet flavors and of savory, with Frutarom’s European R&D and sales and marketing platforms in order to realize and leverage the abundant cross-selling opportunities between their activities and to capitalize on the many synergies brought about by combining René Laurent’s activity with Frutarom’s substantial existing activity in Europe. René Laurent’s R&D and sales and marketing platforms in Asia and Africa will be combined with Frutarom’s platforms. The René Laurent factory in Casablanca, Morocco, will be integrated into Frutarom’s natural extracts operations so that Frutarom can benefit from the competitive cost structure and geographic proximity to the agricultural growing areas for very important plants serving as raw materials for our activities.
“The acquisition of René Laurent is the continuation of Frutarom’s implementation of its rapid and profitable growth strategy and fulfillment of its vision ‘to be the preferred partner for tasty and healthy success. The acquisition will contribute to significantly strengthening our position in the French market where until now we have not had local flavors production and will also help expand our activity in the fast growing French speaking countries of Africa and in Asia.”
“This is the second acquisition we are making this year and follows the acquisition of the South African flavors company Unique Flavors. Since the beginning of 2015 we have already acquired 21 companies which have been integrated into our global activity and are contributing and will keep contributing to the continued growth in sales and improved profits and profitability through the maximum utilization of the synergies they bring. We are working on finding and making further strategic acquisitions of companies and activities in our fields of operations. We will continue carrying out our rapid and profitable growth strategy, which is based on combining profitable internal growth and strategic acquisitions, in order to achieve the targets we recently set: sales of at least US$ 2 billion with an EBITDA margin of over 22% in our core activities by the year 2020.”
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