Birla Said Among Bidders for All Units on Sale in Lafarge Merger

Shrivastava

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla, owner of India’s biggest cement maker, is among bidders weighing offers for all the assets being sold by Holcim Ltd. and Lafarge SA as they merge, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Companies controlled by Birla, including UltraTech Cement Ltd., are considering submitting a bid by next week’s deadline for all the assets and then divesting some after completing a deal, one of the people said. Birla is particularly interested in the Latin American operations, two of the people said, asking not to be identified as the deliberations are private.

The two cement producers are selling units with an enterprise value of 5 billion euros ($6.3 billion) to 7 billion euros, two of the people said, as they seek antitrust backing for a planned $40 billion merger. Lafarge SA Chief Executive Officer Bruno Lafont said Oct. 9 some bidders may seek to snap up all assets that are for sale, which include businesses in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, India and China.

Birla, 47, is directly overseeing the bid preparations, one of the people said. Lafarge and Holcim have had 100 expressions of interest for the units for sale and “will probably have a lot of firm bids,” Lafont said Oct. 9.

While Birla’s companies aren’t interested in Holcim and Lafarge assets in developed markets like the U.S. and Europe, they are aware that a piecemeal offer has a lower chance of succeeding, three of the people said.

Pragnya Ram, a spokeswoman for the Mumbai-based group, and Eike Christian Meuter, a spokesman for Holcim, declined to comment.

Cement Capacity

Birla, who took over as chairman of Aditya Birla Group in 1995, is seeking to boost revenue of the carbon black-to- cellular service conglomerate by 63 percent to $65 billion by 2015. He is India’s eighth-richest person with a net worth of $6.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

UltraTech plans to increase its installed cement capacity to 70 million metric tons by early 2016 from 62 million tons, Birla said Aug. 6. The company, which has a market value of $11.1 billion, is seeking to purchase more cement plants in India and abroad, he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV India in September last year.

The Mumbai-based company agreed last year to buy Jaiprakash Associates Ltd.’s cement factory in Gujarat state for an enterprise value of 38 billion rupees ($621 million).

–With assistance from Patrick Winters in Zurich and Abhishek Shanker in Mumbai.

To contact the reporters on this story: George Smith Alexander in Mumbai at [e-mail]; Aaron Kirchfeld in London at [e-mail]; Bhuma Shrivastava in Mumbai at [e-mail] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Philip Lagerkranser at [e-mail] Ben Scent