From company to company, Brasil group already sells US$ 937.5 million
O Estado de S. Paulo - 07/07/2008
They make part of a discrete group of entrepreneurs who do not like neither to show off nor appearing in the media. In just eight years they built a group of five auto parts' companies that sells R$ 1.5 billion (US$ 937.5 million). The sixth unit is being purchased now: Karmann-Guia, an icon of the automotive industry in the 1960s. Most of them were facing difficulties. They were restructured and are profitable nowadays. Lawyer Sebastião Luis Pereira Lima, and business administrator Antônio Campello Haddad used to give consultancies in industrial administration in the purchase and sale of companies in difficulties. In 2000, instead of intermediate a business, they bought it. It was the beginning of the Brasil Group, currently with 7.2 thousand employees. Since then, a new company has been acquired by the partners every two years, and the perspective is to continue growing. Metalúrgica de Tubos de Precisão (MTP), the first company of the group, was a deficit-making tubes division of Mannesmann, which decided to sell the business. Lima and Haddad were called to evaluate the sale. They decided to make a society and kept the company, installed in Guarulhos (SP). According to Haddad, all the purchased companies "were nothing but a comma for the large corporations", that is, units that were not part of their core business or that were causing losses. Last year, they guaranteed net profits of R$ 28.5 million (US$ 14.8 million) for the group, 195.6% higher than the previous year's. In 2002, another large group, Acesita, tried to sell Sifco, its unit of forged parts in Jundiaí (SP), because it wanted to focus its work on the stainless steel area. The Brasil Group disputed and got the division, which had low profitability. Together with Sifco, the group assumed Westport, a distribution branch of the brand's products in the United States. Alujet, purchased in 2004 by a national group that came from the automotive sector, produced 28 thousand wheels per year in Vinhedo (SP), and nowadays produces 60 thousand. With capital in their hands, the partners paid in cash, as they did with the BR Metal melting, which belonged to ThyssenKrupp, which abandoned this activity in Brazil and in other countries two years ago - the plants of Barra do Piraí (RJ) and Matozinhos (MG) were incorporated to the Brasil Group. Together with the metallurgic sector, the partners got into the plastic area, with Vulcan and Alkor Draca. In order to manage both businesses, they created the Brascon holding, with their metallurgic division being managed by the Brasil Gruop and their plastic division under ILP's umbrella.