M + W makes acquisition
By Peter Dunn
Stuttgart, Germany — Cleanroom builder Meissner + Wurst has acquired a German company with a presence in the wafer fab facilities management industry, and is also forming a new company that will provide advanced engineering to reduce both the costs and environmental impact of wafer fab operations. The firm is also evaluating ways of extending its operations into equipment purchasing.
Jenoptik subsidiary M + W (Stuttgart, Germany) has contracted for a merger with Zander Klimatechnik AG (Nuremburg, Germany), a firm that currently handles facility management for IBM cleanroom locations in Germany and five other European countries. The German Federal Cartel office must still ratify the deal, which will create a firm with combined annual revenues of DM1.86 billion (about $1.02 billion) and 3,125 employees worldwide. The combined enterprise will be managed under Jenoptik`s Clean Systems Technologies group, with Jenoptik AG owning about 73 percent, and the family shareholders of Zander about 27 percent.
Business operations will be divided between plant engineering/construction (including cleanroom automation) and facility management.
Separately, M + W vice president of strategic marketing and corporate business development, Harald Binder, says that M + W has been able to provide turnkey construction services on projects like AMD`s Fab 30 (Dresden, Germany), handling “everything except the equipment purchases.” Hookup services, he notes, can cost $150 million for $1 billion worth of equipment, or two to three times the cost of the cleanroom.
Binder explains that M + W is exploring ways to extend its reach across the “small gap between being ready for equipment and hooking up,” possibly including equipment purchasing. High-level talks with equipment makers are being held, he says, with “everybody looking for a solution for the future.”
Reprinted from WaferNews. WaferNews is a weekly newsletter covering the semiconductor equipment and materials community. For information on subscriptions, check the Web at www.wafernews.com, or contact Kathy Weeks at (603) 891-9174, fax (603) 891-0597, e-mail: [email protected].