MOSCOW (MRC) -- Air Liquide has sold its entities in Greece to Italian gases group SOL for an undisclosed sum, said Chemengonline.
As part of the divestiture, the existing assets of Air Liquide in Greece have been transferred to SOL. Air Liquide’s 104 employees in the country are now SOL employees.
The divestment illustrates Air Liquide’s strategy to review its asset portfolio regularly and focus its expansion in key industrial regions in order to increase its geographic density and therefore enhance performance.
The sales includes Air Liquide Hellas and Vitalaire Hellas. “The divestment illustrates Air Liquide’s strategy to review its asset portfolio regularly and focus its expansion in key industrial regions in order to increase its geographic density and therefore enhance performance,” the company said in a brief statement.
In a separate statement, SOL said that the acquired Air Liquide assets include, among others, an air separation unit (ASU), a liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) production plant, several on-site facilities, along with more than 1,000 customers.
As MRC wrote earlier, in September 2020, Air Liquide finalised an agreement with Sasol to acquire the biggest oxygen production site in the world with a plan to reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 30%. After the announcement on July 29, the international major industry gas company has now entered into a business purchase agreement with Sasol to acquire the oxygen production site in Secunda, South Africa.
We remind that Sasol's world-scale US ethane cracker with the capacity of 1.5 mln tonnes per year reached beneficial operation on 27 August 2019. Sasol's new cracker, the heart of LCCP, is the third and most significant of the seven LCCP facilities that came online and will provide feedstock to the company's six new derivative units at Sasol's Lake Charles multi-asset site.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020).
Established in 1909, Air Liquide Hellas, and its controlled subsidiary Vitalaire HealthcareHellas, is a leading player in the merchant technical gases and home care markets in Greece. SOL Group is already present in the Greek market through its subsidiaries: SOL Hellas and VIVISOL Hellas which operate since many years respectively in the technical gases market and in the home care market. ALH can leverage on a solid asset base, which includes 1 ASU (Air Separation Unit), 1 liquid CO2 production plant, several on-site facilities, 2 filling centers and a complete supply chain of equipment covering the whole country, along with a diversified customer base with more than 1,000 customers served through on-site plants, bulk or cylinder contracts, a longstanding relationship with customers driven by an high level of services and customer satisfaction with more than EUR20 Million revenues in 2019 and a full experienced team of 104 employees with strong knowledge of the business and local market.
MRC