Safran gets lean with sale of Structil

Structil is jointly owned by Safran Ceramics (80.05%) and Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (19.95%). Structil become part of Safran when the latter acquired SNPE's energetic materials business in 2011. Structil designs, produces and sells structural adhesives and high-performance carbon-fiber composite materials for aerospace and other high-tech industries. In 2016 Structil recorded sales of EUR 19 million. It has about 70 employees at its plant in Vert-Le-Petit, near Paris. Hexcel, a benchmark vendor for Safran, specialises in advanced composites technology. It has over 6'300 employees worldwide, including more than 1'000 in France at five plants, and posted sales of about USD 2 billion in 2016 (more than one-fourth in France). Over 85 percent of its sales are to the aerospace sector, including products for airplanes from Airbus (especially the A350 XWB) and Boeing, and the LEAP engine from Safran. Gérard Frut, the Chief Executive Officer of Safran Ceramics, said: "The project proposed by Hexcel would make Structil an integral part of the strategy applied by a global leader in advanced composites, with solid experience in production, widely recognized by its customers, especially in France, where it invests regularly. It offers an excellent technological and industrial fit with Structil, which would immediately benefit from the new environment offered by Hexcel to catalyze its development." The operation should be completed in the second half of 2017, pending approval by the employee representative bodies of Structil and its parent company Safran Ceramics, and the approval of French authorities.