The Belgian Group Cockerill Maintenance & Ingénierie (CMI), and UVK Group have signed a share purchase agreement. The agreement includes a majority share takeover by CMI.

As a new CMI Business Unit, UVK shall be integrated within the Chemical Division of the Steel Business Engineering activity, with CMI Beugin. This new Business Unit will be named CMI UVK/Beugin.

The organization says there will be no changes regarding UVK’s management structure. The transition process will be smooth and will result in no changes to the existing business support levels that are provided to all UVK customers.

As a result of the agreement, CMI UVK/Beugin will be in a position to provide international leadership in technical expertise and services for pickling line and acid regeneration plants.

The UVK Group specializes in project management and process engineering and has offices located in Germany, U.S.A, China, and Brazil. Predominantly focusing in the steel and iron industry, UVK specializes in surface treatment, waste recovery and recycling. It is involved in acid recovery plants and environmental protection plants, and also provides wet process section installations (e.g., pickling lines for stainless and carbon steel), acid regeneration plants, and a range of further products.

In 2004, the UVK Group increased turnover by 70% and the operating result increased by almost 100%. By the end of December 2004, the order backlog almost represented the 2004 turnover. In total, 100 engineers were employed by UVK Group in 2004. UVK recognized that these expansion plans required a strategic partner and cooperation agreements to facilitate a solid financial and strategic foundation.

The CMI Group is a international industrial group with headquarters in Liege, Belgium. It specializes in engineering and maintenance in the Energy, Defense and Industry sectors. CMI Group generally records annual turnover of between 250 and 350 million euros, with 2100 employees located in 22 separate business units. These are mainly based in Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, China, U.S.A., Brazil and Thailand. The CMI Group has carefully structured its global commercial coverage across 5 representative offices for each economic region (New York, Beijing, Moscow, Singapore and Dubai).

Specific to steel business engineering, CMI provides processing lines, ovens and furnaces, chemical and rolling equipment. The CMI Group is among the first companies to have received multi-year delegated maintenance contracts for industrial companies focusing on their core business.

CMI continues to expand its product portfolio for the iron and steel industry through sustained external growth. The aim of such growth is to provide an even better service and to offer closed loop systems to its customers. In 2004, the CMI Group acquired the company M+W (Dortmund, Germany) and the assets of KCS Beugin (La Comté, France).