Fersa Bearings consolidates in Austria with the support of COFIDES

COFIDES will support Fersa Bearings´s consolidation in Austria. For this purpose, the Company will contribute 3.5 million euros taken from the FIEX through a co-investment instrument to A&S Fersa Bearings Europe.

With this investment, Fersa Bearings will own 100% of the Austrian company NKE Bearings GmbH, improving its position from the 49% it acquired in January 2016 and strengthening its position in Central Europe with a new factory, a distribution centre and another centre dedicated to engineering and research, thus accessing new markets and increasing its billing volume. The total investment of the project amounts to 6.6 million euros.

The Fersa Bearings group is in its expansion stage and it currently has a presence on all five continents with four production centres in Spain, Austria and China, six distribution centres and four R&D centres, two in Europe (Spain and Austria) and two in China. Its clients are mainly manufacturers and distributors of automotive components.

COFIDES has helped Fersa Bearings in its international strategy since 2010, when it supported its first production implementation in China. After this, it supported the expansion of the project and it has recently contributed to the implementation of a new project of the group in the Asian country.

COFIDES´s Chairman, Salvador Marín, said that "the support of COFIDES has contributed to the extensive international development of Fersa Bearings, which has allowed the company to grow and move from being a SME to a large company strengthening its competitiveness and consolidating its parent company in Spain".

For its part, Fersa´s CEO, Carlos Oehling, said that "COFIDES has helped the group from the beginning of its international expansion, contributing know-how and financial strategy to the internationalisation process. Thus, COFIDES is a partner on which we rely for our future plans of global expansion".

COFIDES is a public-private company which has been offering financial support to Spanish companies investing abroad since 1988. It is the exclusive manager of FIEX and FONPYME funds on behalf of the Secretariat of State for Trade attached to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism. Shareholders include Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), Banco Santander, Banco Popular, Banco Sabadell and CAF-Development Bank of Latin America.