Oh what a difference! If you drive off a German autobahn to a service area, your forehead wrinkles as a precaution. The atmosphere is dreary, the culinary selection is modest, but everything is terribly expensive: the snacks, the floppy rolls, petrol and diesel anyway. On the way to Italy, on the other hand, every Bambino already knows about the promise when the first Autogrill sign lights up on the horizon. The brand name alone reveals what kind of crispy panini await the traveler here. The espresso is called suddenly coffee and stands more for enjoyment than just being a vile pick-me-up. It’s easy to forget that this little preview of the upcoming holiday isn’t cheap either.
Because Autogrill has long since ceased to focus solely on conveying an authentic Italian feeling. For more than 20 years, the group has been pushing ahead with its internationalization, has invested heavily in airport catering in the USA and Canada and has already opened restaurants in Austria and Slovenia, for example. Now the Swiss travel goods retailer Dufry wants to buy the Italian company. The transaction would create a leading travel retailer with sales of CHF 13.6 billion and around 60,000 employees.
Dufry is offering a total of around CHF 1.8 billion in cash and shares for Autogrill. “We continue to diversify the group and increase our resilience,” said Dufry boss Xavier Rossinyol, who will also lead the new company. The most important Autogrill shareholder with a good 50 percent, the Benetton family through their Edizione holding company, is said to support the deal and become the new company’s largest shareholder. The merger, which still has to be approved by the competition authorities, is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2023. In addition to the shares of the Benetton family, the Swiss would also like to take over the remaining shares and are therefore offering investors 0.158 Dufry notes or 6.33 euros per share in cash for each Autogrill paper. In response to the announcement, Dufry shares rose 5.6 percent in the stock market, while Autogrill lost 8 percent.
“We consider the takeover price to be fair,” said Reto Lötscher, an analyst at Luzerner Kantonalbank. In the first half of 2022, Dufry increased sales by 145 percent compared to the previous year. Measured against the pre-crisis year 2019, however, there was still a minus of a quarter. Both companies expect to save annual costs of around 85 million Swiss francs (about 85.4 million euros) as a result of the merger.