Transactions

The WECK Group based in Wehr-Öfflingen in Baden-Württemberg, is a traditional manufacturer of glass jars for the food industry. For over 100 years the family-owned enterprise, with a workforce that currently stands at 350 employees, has developed and manufactured spring-topped jars for conserving and keeping foodstuffs.  The term “einwecken” has become a generic term in the German language for conserving food and can be found in the Duden dictionary. In addition, the Company also manufactures other products such as glass candle holders and packaging jars for the food industry at its plant in Bonn.

Since 1982 the group has been managed by Eberhard Hackelsberber, the great-grandson of the company’s founder. Due to the inability of the family to find a successor within its ranks, a search for a suitable external investor had become unavoidable. As a result of a sharp rise in the costs of raw material and energy caused by the Ukraine war and the capital-intensive investments needed to modernize the glass factory, the group of companies found itself in a liquidity crisis in the middle of 2023. The primary task of Wintergerst was therefore to find a financially strong investor that could support the group on its future growth trajectory. An interdisciplinary team of experienced restructuring and corporate finance experts drew up a restructuring concept and business plan and prepared its implementation. In parallel, a search began for a suitable investor within the framework of an international M&A process.

AURELIUS, a global alternative investment group, managed to win the competitive bidding process ahead of a number of interested international players. AURELIUS is a well-known specialist for complex investments that exhibit particular operating potential. WECK, an internationally-recognized brand, offers AURELIUS the ability to tap into attractive growth potential and boost the profitability of the Group. Eberhard Hackelsberger will continue to support the company in an advisory capacity.

“I am pleased that, with Wintergerst at our side, we had an experienced and professional team of M&A consultants to support us. The broad suite of skills possessed by Wintergerst enabled us to find an investor that intends to keep growing the business in future and therefore offers long-terms prospects,” says Eberhard Hackelsberger, managing director of J. Weck GmbH u. Co. KG.

“Thanks to our competences in restructuring and corporate finance, we were able to support WECK with the task of finding a suitable investor. Our many years of experience in M&A, operating at the interface between family-owned companies and private equity funds, also stood us in good stead”, confides Volker Wintergerst, founder and managing partner at Wintergerst Societät für Unternehmer-Beratung. The interdisciplinary cooperation within the team and our international network were key success factors in realizing this transaction in a very challenging market environment,” adds Christian Scharfenberger, who managed the project for Wintergerst together with his colleagues, Vincent Buhl, Theo-Philo Rempel and Lukas Mauch.