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Once Ren Jianxin has an acquisition target in his sights, he does not let go of it easily. Months after the head of China’s largest chemicals company failed in a bid for Syngenta, which valued the Swiss agribusiness at $42bn, ChemChina is reportedly closing in on a higher offer.
If the transaction is concluded, it would represent the largest overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and would give Mr Ren his second major trophy in as many years.
Last year ChemChina, one of the country’s largest state-owned enterprises with Rmb300bn ($45.6bn) in revenues and 140,000 employees, paid €7.3bn ($7.9bn) for Italy’s Pirelli, one of the world’s most famous tyre companies.
That transaction was the latest example of Mr Ren’s dogged approach to deal-making after an initial offer was abandoned three years earlier. Sealing the deal with Syngenta would — as was the case with ChemChina’s Pirelli coup — make the Chinese group a major player in a sector where it was previously little known.
Syngenta is one of the dominant names in the $100bn-a-year agribusiness industry alongside Monsanto, Dupont’s seed business and the agriculture units of BASF, Bayer and Dow Chemical.
Mr Ren recently poached a Bayer director, Michael Koenig, to run one of ChemChina’s key subsidiaries in a rare example of an SOE hiring foreign talent for a top position. Mr Koenig ran both Bayer’s China and Asia operations and will take over China National Bluestar Corp.
Bluestar was originally an industrial cleaning company founded in 1984 by Mr Ren, who at the time was a young chemicals ministry cadre backed by a mere Rmb10,000 government loan. Using Bluestar as his main vehicle, he set about snapping up other state chemicals companies in a buying frenzy that earned him a reputation as “China’s merger king”.
The group was relaunched as ChemChina in 2004 and is one of only 117 state industrial champions directly administered by the Chinese government’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
Today Bluestar acts as a holding company for ChemChina’s various overseas chemical businesses, which include Adisseo and Rhodia of France and Australia’s Qenos.
The three acquisitions, done in 2006, made ChemChina the largest Chinese investor in France. The company later purchased Elkem, a Norwegian silicon maker, and Adama, an Israeli agribusiness.
The spree shows no signs of slowing. This month alone Mr Ren agreed to pay $1bn for Krauss Maffee, the German machinery company, and bought a 12 per cent stake in Mercuria that values the Swiss energy trader at more than $3bn.
Mr Ren’s preference for European targets is due in part to difficulties encountered in the US. Last year he complained that he had been denied routine US business visas, and any attempt by ChemChina to buy Syngenta’s US rivals would prove very controversial in a presidential election year.
On Friday, Philips announced that a planned $3bn sale of a lighting business to Chinese private equity investors had been knocked back by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or CFIUS.
Political considerations aside, ChemChina’s eurocentric shopping spree has been helped by euro weakness, with the EU currency having fallen more than 25 per cent against the renminbi since 2011.
