Efacec to be privatised by December

The Portuguese Government has high hopes that it will be able to privatise the electrical energy components and mobility products company Efacec by the end of November this year.

The privatisation process will enter a third phase to see if offers for the company can be bettered.
There are currently two offers on the table being negotiated for the share that the Portuguese State currently has in Efacec.
The third phase to see if the two offers can be improved upon was taken at a Council of Ministers meeting on Wednesday last week.
Although the process could drag on to the end of the year, the Government is hopeful that the 71.73% share sale will be made by the end of November.
The two companies which are negotiating are both Portuguese – DST and Sing-Investments Globais (linked to the industrial company Sodecia), the only companies to have presented binding offers by the 19 July deadline but which the government thinks are too low.
A statement from the Council of Ministers makes clear its aims: “to put forward better final binding offers” and the idea is not to let the negotiations which are being undertaken by Parpública – a public umbrella company for state-owned enterprises — to drag out the negotiations.
The reason why the offers were below expected is that Efacec’s account sheet has deteriorated which led the two bidding groups to put in offers that were well below the Government’s reserve price. Both companies insist that an investment plan worth tens of millions of euros would be required to get Efacec back on its feet.
With a presence in the Energy, Mobility and Environment value chain, Efacec operates as a supplier of solutions and integrated EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) systems and O&M (Operations & Maintenance) services partner.  Efacec is present in strategic markets such as Europe, the United States, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa.
One of its areas is producing, building and automising electricity sub-stations. Efacec Power Solutions Group, through Efacec Power Solutions Brazil, was contracted to modernise and automate two substations in the city of Rio de Janeiro: Santíssimo Substation, located in Campo Grande neighbourhood, and Samaritano Substation in Botafogo neighbourhood. Both belong to Light Serviços de Eletricidade’s distribution network, an electric power supply company that is present in 31 municipalities in the state of Rio de Janeiro, distributing energy to more than 10 million people in Brazil. They will be completed in 2022.