Cruel irony : while the digging of the metro Grand Paris Express generates commands tunnelling in quantities that may never occur again in france, the last French manufacturer of these huge machines look helplessly, the markets escape from him, one after the other the benefit of his only european competitor, the German Herrenknecht.
NFM Technologies, in receivership since August 2, waiting for a buyer. A company committee shall meet on Tuesday, November 6, to give an opinion after reviewing the only bid submitted at the cut-off date, Friday 2 November. The Lyon commercial court must review the record Wednesday, November 7, without a decision to be made this day a priori : the points are likely to be clarified.
Two candidates had filed preliminary bids for the resumption of business of 136 employees located in Villeurbanne (Rhone) and le Creusot (Saône-et-Loire) : the German Mühlhäuser and the French Altifort. The second eventually gave up, preferring to reserve all of its forces to a larger piece, the recovery of the steel mill Ascoval.
Rest Mühlhäuser, well known to the employees of NFM : the German company, specialized in the supply of equipment for tunnelling, is a long-standing partner of the French group. If its bid is judged to be serious, it will not only strengthen the industrial base of NFM, and to clean up its finances, but also to rebuild a reputation badly affected in recent years.
Under the control of the chinese NHI
For NFM, the trouble started in 2007, when the company was founded in 1988, is under the control of the chinese group in the NHI. The new shareholder undertakes NFM in a trade policy that is aggressive and uncontrolled growth. “NHI asked to NFM to double its turnover to workforce virtually constant, which, in our industry, is unrealistic “,…
