French builder Eiffage in talks to buy Toulouse-Blagnac airport, creating a bookend for Chinese owner’s tumultuous investment
- Casil Europe, a unit of the venture between Shandong Hi-Speed Group and Friedman Pacific Asset Management, paid €308 million in 2014 for 49.99 per cent of the Toulouse-Blagnac airport
- The 2014 sale, initially hailed as a successful case of privatisation of French public assets, had been mired in legal wrangling and what local media called”disengagement” among shareholders
Eiffage SA, the third-largest civil engineering builder in France and a contractor in the Channel Tunnel, said it has started exclusive talks to buy 49.99 per cent of the Toulouse-Blagnac airport, taking the stake off the hands of its Chinese owner after a tumultuous attempt to privatise the country’s fifth-largest airfield.
The stake was put up for sale by Casil Europe, a unit of China Airport Synergy Investment Limited (Casil), which is in turn a venture between Shandong Hi-Speed Group and Hong Kong entrepreneur Mike Poon Ho-man’s Friedman Pacific Asset Management.
Casil paid €308 million (US$345 million/) in 2014 for the biggest single stake for the hometown airfield used by Airbus.
The exclusive talks could be a bookend to a tumultuous five years of ownership by Casil, which had been unable to “access” the airport’s remaining shareholders to jointly develop and expand Toulous-Blagnac, French media Le Figaro said, citing the French economy ministry in saying that the stake owners were “disengaging” with their Chinese shareholder.
“Aviation-related infrastructure is good investment for its stable returns in the long term. But the time horizon for infrastructure investment is longer than other assets, longer than 25 years on average,” said David Yu, professor of finance at New York University in Shanghai. “There is a lot of uncertainties in acquisitions in the EU, especially with simmering issues including” Britain’s exit from the region.”