Frankfurt According to financial circles, Stuttgart-based plant manufacturer Exyte is looking for an investor. The Austrian entrepreneur Georg Stumpf wants to sell a minority stake and hopes for an overall valuation of around four billion euros, as people familiar with the matter said.
Deutsche Bank is organizing the investor process for the plant manufacturer, which is currently benefiting massively from the chip boom. The process is only at the beginning and decisions are not to be expected in the short term. Exyte and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
In an interview with Handelsblatt in April, Exyte CEO Wolfgang Büchele announced that the company would grow to a turnover of ten billion euros by 2027 – a doubling compared to 2021. In view of dramatic supply bottlenecks, chip companies are currently investing billions in new plants worldwide. The order intake in the first months of the year was well above expectations, Büchele had explained. Its customers include Intel and Infineon, among others.
But there are also critical voices about the company’s prospects. “The chip cycle is already at its peak,” said one person familiar with the industry.
Exyte has already tried several times to inspire investors – so far without success. The company originally wanted to go public in 2018 and aimed for a valuation of three billion euros. This did not work out as well as an IPO by means of a spac deal, i.e. the merger with a listed company shell.
According to financial circles, Exyte had already almost reached a trade agreement with a US spac last year, but at that time there was no investor interest for the required capital increase (pipe). The deal was called off.
Exyte sees itself as a leading provider for the planning, development and construction of high-tech systems, in particular chip plants. The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that the chip industry’s sales will increase by up to eight percent every year by 2030. To meet this demand, dozens of new works are needed. In Europe alone, production capacity must quadruple if the EU wants to achieve its self-set goal.
The name is hardly known to the public, but Exyte has a long tradition: the company founded in 1912 by Karl Meissner and Paul Wurst is one of the pioneers of cleanroom technology. Over the past 30 years, the owners have changed frequently, even more often the CEOs. The company has been owned by Georg Stumpf since 2009.
