Bekaert Ups External Investment

Bekaert has put in a bid to take over the ECC card clothing division of Carclo, which deals in plastic components and specialist wire products.
ECC has facilities in the UK, France, Italy, Turkey, USA, Canada, China and India, and achieves annual sales of €24 million.

The value of the acquisition is estimated at €13 million. Carclo and Bekaert are expected to reach an agreement in the coming weeks.
The company first invested in this market in 2002 with the acquisition of Sobelcard in Zwevegem, Belgium, which produces half products for card clothing manufacturers.

Earlier this year, Bekaert set up a joint-venture with Wuxi Owl Textile Accessories a producer of card clothing in China. In the course of the year work will start to set up a production facility in Wuxi (Jiangsu Province in China) for the manufacture of card clothing, which will eventually employ around a hundred people.