Nacho Abia took office just two weeks ago as the new CEO of Grifols, with the effects of the attacks from the Gotham City Research reports still present. This Wednesday he appeared in society in Clayton (United States), where the Catalan multinational blood products company has its main plasma factory. And there, before a group of journalists, he launched a phrase that sounded like an amendment to the last four months. “Perhaps we could have been clearer,” he said about the explanations offered to refute the accusations of the bearish fund that has sunk the company's shares by 40%.
“Transparency has been there,” he said regarding the existence of the documentation, “but clarity could perhaps be better,” defending that all the transactions that Gotham used to sink the company's value were made “with the best intentions to help the company.” In his first public intervention, Abia defended a new way of approaching society: “People have to know us more and we have to be clear in our plans.”
As it has already indicated to analysts, the company has one objective for the coming months: to refinance unsecured debt and boost cash flows to help pay off loans and boost investments. Regarding the recovery of the share price, Grifols is unable to set objectives, both the new CEO and the president of the company, Thomas Glanzmann, have pointed out. In fact, the latter has argued that both problems are probably indistinguishable, there will not be one without the other. “If we recover our reputation we will be able to explain it better to investors, because it requires a lot of credibility,” Abia stated.
Both Abia and Glanzmann have today been the protagonists in Clayton, its largest production plant for plasma medicines, located in the American town of Clayton (North Carolina) and acquired in 2011 when it bought Talecris Biotherapeutics. These immense facilities, to which this newspaper has attended at the invitation of the company, have become the source of 42% of its production after having invested 1,000 million dollars (942 million dollars) in different expansions to quadruple its production capacity. production. And it is where the Catalan group sees its greatest growth in the future, given that it barely occupies a third of the surface area it has.
“It is the jewel in the company's crown,” Thomas Glanzmann, executive president of the Catalan group, defined it in the company's first public event after the Gotham attack, in which he wanted to demonstrate the strength of the company. productive capacity of the group. Part of the company's future passes through the Clayton facilities, where the company has expansions to be able to produce the next proteins they develop, among them those that will have to see the light of day starting in 2026 with Biotest, its latest great acquisition and which is destined to accelerate the growth of the group's profits. “It is our vector of growth,” said the director of operations, Daniel Fleta.
The company's vice president, Raimon Grifols, has taken advantage of the event in the United States to vindicate his family's work. “We have seen how our competitors have been bought, merged and changed their names. Grifols is still here and we are very proud of our name,” he said at a time when the family is leaving the decision-making core of the company. Later, when asked by journalists, he acknowledged that the company has gone through difficult times, but that facilities like those in Clayton allow the family to rest assured.
Once the changes in management have been completed with the debut of Nacho Abia as CEO and the CNMV file has been finalized – which noted “relevant deficiencies” in its way of calculating EBITDA and debt -, Grifols has other operations ahead of it. course. The first is to sell 20% of its stake in Shanghai RAAS to the Chinese group Haier, an injection of 1,600 million that will help it reduce the 9,416 million it accumulates in net debt (without taking into account other non-financial leverage), as analysts expect. The other is to obtain more cash resources through the two new products that it hopes to achieve from the purchase of Biotest in 2021, its last major acquisition.
The Spanish manufacturer of blood products considers that these American facilities explain well the growth recorded by the company in the last 15 years. Just before acquiring it, it had a turnover of 1.8 billion euros and thanks to it it rose to the podium of blood product manufacturers, with a turnover that today reaches 6.6 billion. Its acquisition also contains other elements that explain Grifols today. The purchase of Talecris was one of the operations with which the company made it clear that it would leverage itself if necessary to grow (it cost 2.8 billion euros) and it is one in which Scranton, the Dutch company owned by the family, had a relevant participation. Grifols, which controls around 7% of the shares of the blood products group: kept the facilities and rented them to Grifols, which had the possibility of repurchasing them.
Today, 14 million vials of medicines from plasma come out of these 283-hectare facilities where 1,600 people work. It works at maximum capacity, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and its technology is the example that Grifols tries to bring to other plants it has around the world, such as the Canadian one in Montreal or the Egyptian one in Cairo. During the covid health crisis, it was from Clayton that the antiSARS-CoV-2 hyperimmune globulin came out, obtained through plasma that had overcome the coronavirus. But in addition to other plasma derivatives for the treatment of infectious diseases, other immunoglobalins (for patients with immunodeficiencies and neurological disorders) and albumins (used in intensive care units) are also produced at the center, among other products.
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