Sale of industrial giant Stork ‘almost complete’, part still loss-making

Of annual figures that Fluor Corporation presented yesterday afternoon, it seems that Stork still hasn’t been sold. However, negotiations on this are now almost complete. It can also be concluded from the presentation that the Dutch company, together with its much smaller sister Ameco, suffered a loss of $39 million last year.

17,000 employees

Stork Technical Services maintains technical facilities such as chemical plants and refineries and has annual sales of $1.6 billion. The company has approximately 17,000 employees worldwide, including 2,000 in the Netherlands.

The company was once the largest part of a Dutch industrial conglomerate, together with Fokker Services and several machine builders. At the end of 2015, Stork TS was sold to the American construction giant Fluor.

Takeover failed

However, the takeover ended in failure, according to a reconstruction by RTL Z. Stork recorded significant losses under Fluor, and in January 2021 the Americans announced that they wanted to sell the subsidiary again.

When that failed, Stork was split last year to sell into parts. In May, Fluor still expected the European side before the end of 2022 could be transferred to a “preferred buyer”, with whom exclusive talks were already underway.

Hard sales

This new plan also failed, except for the sale of a few small parts in Australia and New Zealand. The American parts of Stork ultimately remained in Fluor’s hands.

The annual report published yesterday afternoon shows that the European part of Stork is still exposed. In additional information, the company says negotiations for the sale are now underway. final phase are situated.

Lose

The $39 million loss from Stork and the much smaller Ameco unit takes a big chunk out of Fluor’s annual profit.

The parent company posted a profit of $145 million from continuing operations last year on sales of $13.7 billion. But the loss of Stork and Ameco and some other elements has not yet been compensated. That leaves just $67 million in net income from core operations.

It’s unclear why it wasn’t possible to get rid of Stork earlier, whether negotiations are still ongoing with the same “preferred buyer” from last year, and how much of the loss Stork accounted for.

The annual report says nothing about it, and spokesperson Brian Mershon won’t answer questions. “We can only say something about the current state of things, and you can find it on our website find.”