The Timken Company says it has reached an agreement to acquire BEKA Lubrication for around $165 million, expanding its market share in the automatic lubrication market which it entered in 2013 with the purchase of Interlube.
Timken is already a leader in engineered bearings and power transmission products. BEKA, meanwhile, is a global supplier of automatic lubrication systems and serves a range of industrial sectors including wind, food and beverage, rail, on- and off-highway and other process industries.
Just one of the products BEKA produces for the mining industry is the BEKA-MAX automatic lubrication system, which services vehicles such as dump trucks, draglines, excavators, LHDs , shovels and rock drills.
Richard G Kyle, Timken President and CEO, said the acquisition of BEKA expanded the company’s global leadership in the attractive automatic lubrication systems market sector, in addition to increasing Timken’s geographic scale and market coverage in Europe and Asia. It also created new opportunities to serve wind and other industrial end markets more fully, he added.
“BEKA is a premier brand and technical leader, and like our Groeneveld business (which it acquired in 2017), offers automatic and central lubrication systems that reduce operating costs and extend equipment life,” Kyle said.
“We expect to realise significant synergies, margin expansion and revenue growth opportunities through the combined Groeneveld-BEKA business.”
BEKA, family owned and operated since its founding in 1927, is headquartered in Pegnitz, Germany. Its sales are expected to be around $135 million for the full year 2019. The company employs around 900 people, with manufacturing, research and development based in Germany, and assembly facilities and sales offices around the world.
With the acquisition of BEKA, Timken says it will become the world’s second largest producer of industrial automatic lubrication systems, according to industry estimates. Automatic systems have gradually displaced manual lubrication methods to improve equipment life and reliability, while reducing the total cost of ownership.
The company concluded: “The transaction advances the company’s strategy, which is focused on growing its leadership position in engineered bearings while diversifying Timken’s portfolio into adjacent products and markets.”
The privately negotiated transaction is subject to regulatory review approval in Germany and is expected to close during the December quarter of this year.
