Balfour Beatty is to acquire the German rail engineering group Schreck-Mieves for €36m.
Schreck-Mieves supplies trackwork to the German mainline rail industry (Deutsche Bahn), and the mass transit and industrial markets through three divisions in the West, Central and East of Germany. It also has operations in Holland and Russia. Rail components and systems are manufactured at the company's facilities in Dortmund and Braunschweig.
The company had 2007 sales of €118m, operating profits of €3.3m and net assets of €17m. Profits were held back by under-performance in the systems and components business, which Balfour says will be 'addressed' after the acquisition.
Balfour Beatty is no stranger to the rail engineering business.
Major recent projects that its Rail Power Systems arm have been involved with include the electrification of the approved tunnel and mainline station in Berlin, electrification of the Ingolstadt to Nuremberg line, the Metro do Porto extension in Portugal and the high-speed electrification of the Milan-Turin line in Italy.
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