December 21, 2021
This disengagement is a major turning point for the group.
Bolloré has found a buyer for its subsidiary Bolloré Africa Logistics. The Italian-Swiss amateur MSC offered to buy this activity for an enterprise value of 5.7 billion euros. “The Bolloré Group has granted exclusivity to the MSC group until March 31, 2022 », Specifies in a press release the French industrialist. This branch, which employs more than 20,000 people, operates port terminals, warehouses and rail concessions in more than twenty countries in Africa. It achieves a turnover of 2.1 billion out of a total of 24.1 billion for the group.
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This well-advanced disposal project does not mark the end of Bolloré’s activities in Africa. “In any case, the group will retain a significant presence in Africa, in particular through Canal +, the leading pay-TV operator in French-speaking Africa and a major shareholder of MultiChoice, the leader in pay-TV in English-speaking Africa. It will also continue its developments there in many sectors such as communication, entertainment, telecoms, publishing.The company said on Monday.
This disengagement is nevertheless a major turning point for the group. If Bolloré is now known to the general public for investing heavily in the media, it is in logistics and on the African continent that he built the foundations of his empire. If it completes this sale, Bolloré will remain a major player in logistics with its activity as a freight forwarder, which it provides in 109 countries.
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The identity of the buyer, MSC, is no surprise. It is logical that a shipowner should be interested in an operator of port infrastructure. Thus, at the beginning of November, the French CMA CGM bought for nearly 2 billion the third terminal of the port of Los Angeles. Shipowners have the means to make such acquisitions: with the disruption of supply chains, shipping prices have jumped and these operators have never made so much money.
