Will Bolloré give up business in Africa?
Morgan Stanley recently carried out a financial assessment on the logistics and port assets of the French Bolloré group. The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
Overheated by bottlenecks in major global ports and the accelerated expansion of DP World (Dubai Ports World) and Abu Dhabi Ports, the logistics sector is currently being targeted by all major global investment banks. They want to take advantage of hyperactivity to increase the value of existing assets and obtain profitable sales mandates.
WHAT MORGAN STANLEY DOES
Like many of its competitors, the Morgan Stanley bank recently carried out , on its own, a financial assessment of the logistics and port assets of the French Bolloré group. Once established, through these benchmarks, that there is an interest in the sale of certain assets, advisory banks will see the potential seller recommend the deal (and, incidentally, offer their services). A mandate from Bolloré is particularly coveted by big names in financial advisory, because the family group has historically worked with the Rothschild bank, Vincent Bolloré's longtime advisor.
On October 15, Morgan Stanley's benchmark appeared in the press: the French newspaper Le Monde reported that Bolloré was preparing to sell its African assets. If this scenario is regularly mentioned, at every strategic review carried out by Bolloré, it is not considered as a project that is actually feasible by the leaders of the group.
They are most concerned about the close of the current fiscal year, which ends in less than two months. However, given the global context of the sector, all advisory banks, and not just Morgan Stanley, are looking forward to it.
THE COMPETITION IN AFRICA
What is absolutely certain, however, is the ruthless competition that exists in Africa between the various big names in logistics. In fact, these were not wrong: on 12 October one of Bolloré's main competitors in Africa, the Emirate group DP World, evaluated its management contracts for three African ports (Senegal, Egypt and Somaliland) in joint venture with the British and that is, with the CDC Group development fund.
For its part, Abu Dhabi Ports, in full African expansion, has joined forces with the French shipowner and logistics company CMA CGM as we had indicated in a previous article .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/bollore-morgan-stanley-africa-porti/ on Tue, 19 Oct 2021 06:06:25 +0000.