Alba Group and Techcent form joint venture

Pictured above: Dr. Axel Schweitzer, chairman of the Alba Group, will act as chairman of the joint venture company.

The Alba Group, a leading recycling and environmental services company and raw material providers, has partnered with Chinese company Techcent in an effort to grow its business in that country. The Alba Group, based in Berlin, and an investment fund led by the Deng family, the dominant shareholder of Techcent, signed an agreement to form a joint venture that will become effective 1 January 2017.

The joint venture will consist of selected areas of Alba Group’s Chinese business relating to technology recycling growth areas, such as electronic scrap and automobile recycling. In addition, the partnership will include the services segment that consists of the Dual System Interseroh, which plays a major role in the collection and treatment of packaging waste from the Yellow Bin/Yellow Bag programme in Germany, as well as sorting facilities for light packaging. The agreement also states that Dr. Axel Schweitzer, chairman of the Alba Group, will act as chairman of the joint venture company.

While both parties say they have agreed to treat the details of the agreement as strictly confidential, they did add that Techcent’s share in these two segments of Alba’s business will amount to 60%.

“As announced, we were able to identify a matching co-investor for our China business and our segment services before the end of the year,” Schweitzer says in a news release.

“As a listed but still a family-run company, Techcent shares both our values and our strategy. Techcent is the perfect partner to powerfully promote the growth of both lines of business,” Schweitzer adds.

“The Alba technology enjoys an excellent reputation in China,” Deng Xiang, managing partner at Techcent, says in the news release. “Based on our experience in our home market, we jointly aim to take recycling to the state of the art level in China. This partnership with Alba Group constitutes a further significant step in terms of our worldwide successful business strategy also in Germany. After our entrance at Bilfinger Water, it illustrates our position as leading Sino-German environmental services company.”

With its two brands—Alba and Interseroh—and a total of 7,500 employees, Alba Group operates within Germany, Europe and Asia. The company had approximately €2.2 billion in turnover in 2015.

Techcent is a leading environmental company headquartered in Chengdu in Sichuan, China. Founded in 2001, the company focuses on research, development, services and engineering in environmental technologies. In March 2016, Techcent acquired Bilfinger Water Technologies GmbH, a provider of water treatment technologies.