Mergers and acquisitions on domestic delivery market (Romania)

The beginning of this year brought an avalanche of mergers and acquisitions on the domestic delivery market. Founders of Cargus sold the company to the international player DHL, Pegasus was taken over by GeoPost and Yurtici Cargo, company Trans Courier Service was bought by UPS, whereas TCE Logistics and Curiero merged.
Fan Courier is the only delivery company of the top three which did not announce its selling intention. ‘’The growth can be made this way, too,” say the company’s founders.
‘’When you have an annual growth of some 50%, what’s the point of purchasing a company that will bring you a 10% rise, but that will empty your pockets? For the time being we are capable of supporting our investments and we believe that we will have carried them out, the level will be similar to the one of a European company,” Fan Courier representatives said.

For this year, Fan Courier plans to make investments worth 20 million euros. “We’ve conceived ever since last year a pretty bold investments plan. We will construct a new headquarters that will endorse our growth. The land alone cost us 2.5 million euros and the investments in the building alone will reach about 8.5 million euros. To them adds the transporting strip that will cost other 4 million euros. Then there will be the equipment of all our couriers with PDAs (personal digital assistant), which entails other 2 million euros. However, when we will finalize the investments, our company might really compete from a technical and quality viewpoint with any company from Romania and from abroad,” say the owners of the company.

Related to a prospective sell of the company, there have been many offers but none went beyond the principle stage.

‘’In order to have serious talks, you have to really want to sell, to make an audit. We have never went further of the first stage of talks, of intention, which we considered as a beneficial exchange of experience,” said Adrian Mihai, one of the owners.
Managing director at Fan Courier, Felix Patrascanu, for his part, emphasized that only when the company will no longer be able to develop through its own sources a prospective sell might be taken into account.

The first quarter of the year, the company reported a turnover worth 9.8 million euros, over the same period of the previous year.
The Bucharest-based company was established in 1997 with a starting capital worth some 30,000 dollars and the profit came up in 2001. After 2001 and until 2004, the profit was reinvested in the business. The first dividends were cashed the next year.