Batek Makina Ltd., the Turkish battery equipment manufacturer, signed the final take-over documents for its acquisition of Italian formation firm Bertola Snc and its subsidiary Moran on January 14, Batteriesinternational.com reports.
“We had negotiated most of the deal about a year and a half ago,” says Mahmut Celal Sarıçam, managing director and co-founder of Batek, “But the pandemic has delayed our earlier plans until now.”
The immediate aim will be to ship Bertola equipment from its operations in Milan to Batek’s new plant in Dilovasi, Kocaeli. All existing users of Bertola and Moran equipment will be served by Batek from now on.
Saricam says the formation side of the business should be ready to start in March.
The acquisition of Bertola is a bold initiative by Batek in that the formation business is very different from other sectors of battery machine manufacturing. Only a couple of firms, such as Sovema Group, include formation equipment as part of their wider product offering.
“One of our objectives through this was to invest in our core business in a distinct way that would basically ensure a vertical growth while bringing some aspects of diversification,” Saricam told BESB.
“Bertola definitely fits our agenda of investing in this fashion as the battery formation business typically is a separate branch of technology. We hope to revitalize the legacy of Bertola — one of the best known names in the formation business — and the Moran brands,” he says.
Bertola is one of the oldest firms in the battery charging equipment industry. Its formation business was founded in 1958 in Italy, where it developed several technologies that eclipsed others in the industry, such as IGBT-based battery formation rectifiers.
Bertola is a family owned business and one of the reasons for the sales was the difficulty of passing on the company to the next generation. A previous sale of the business fell through a couple of years ago.
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