If you are to believe trading experts, a spectacular deal is lurking in the Austrian real estate and furniture industry: according to this, the Kika/Leiner chain, founded almost exactly five years ago by René Benko and his Signa with the active aid of the then Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, taken over by furniture giant Steinhoff, is about to be sold to Frank Albert’s Supernova Group.
Scene connoisseurs do not hide the fact that there is a real need for renovation at Kika/Leiner; German-born Frank Albert, who has had close ties to Austria for some 30 years, had already made a name for himself when he took over the then financially distressed DIY chain bauMax (summer 2015) and its parent company (4,000 employees). in the end, 40 of the 58 branches could be passed on to and received by OBI.
Would be another disappointment
If the stubborn takeover rumors are true, René Benko would again have to deal with a major setback: the department store juggler, who did not seem to dare to close a deal a few years ago to expand his real estate group into an international general store, would, after the debacle surrounding Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof (GKK) have to accept a further downsizing towards the core business.
Most recently, the “Mirror” already asked the question: “Is the Benko bubble nibbling?” At the end of May, the “Manager Magazin” also reported on the alleged urgent wish of the Signa shareholders (including the Austrian Hans Peter Haselsteiner) that they like each other again and focus on real estate. The EUR 40 billion Signa real estate investor Klaus-Michael Kühne should now also be very concerned: “It is in the nature of things that the best Signa times are over; the real estate boom has come to an end and financing costs have risen sharply.”
Furniture store for a bargain price
In the recent past, Benko had attracted attention with two spectacular deals related to Kika/Leiner: first, at Christmas 2017, he took over Kika/Leiner’s then flagship store on Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna, according to media reports, for a soft price. Six months later, the government under Sebastian Kurz considered it very important that the Tyrolean, who still had an affinity with Kurz, could take over the well-known furniture chain in its entirety. Incidentally, the name of Benko’s competitor in the takeover of Kika/Leiner was: Frank Albert.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
