The owners of the Höchst industrial park operator Infraserv are evidently making a fresh attempt to sell the company.

As can be heard in circles around the company, they have approached investment banks about the project, as is common in such processes.

It was said that no institute had yet been appointed with a mandate.

Klaus Max Smolka

Editor in business.

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Around 22,000 people are currently employed in the Höchst industrial park, and the site operator Infraserv has around 1900 employees. The chemical park in Höchst is one of the most traditional of its kind in Germany.Until the 1990s, it was the production site of Hoechst AG, after which Infraserv emerged from the site services of the former Höchst main plant and has since established itself as a site operator and industrial service provider for the pharmaceutical industry. , Chemical and biotech industries established. The operator Infraserv did not want to comment on the report.

The Höchst "Chemical Park" - as these terrains are euphemistically presented to the outside world - has been a sales candidate for many years.

Almost 20 years ago, according to FAZ information, there were concrete discussions between the co-owners Celanese, Clariant and the Sanofi predecessor company Aventis, all three of whom belonged to the inheritance of the broken Hoechst Group. 

Interested investors

The talks failed not because of the price, but because of different ideas about the future of the chemical industry. The basic problem was the concern of whether a future owner would develop the site in the long term - because the three companies, as customers, would continue to depend on good infrastructure. At the time, those involved named waste disposal, sewage treatment, energy, environmental protection and safety as examples. Interested parties were mainly financial investors who were not so well known in Germany at the time.

It was only later that they became a household name - largely with the acquisition of Celaneses by Blackstone.

The former Celanese board member Andreas Pohlmann confirmed the information in the summer of 2003.

"We talked to various financial investors and strategic investors," he said at the time.

“At the end of the day, they didn't lead to success.” He said at the time that “for the foreseeable future” there would be no change in the ownership structure;

however, one continues to observe the environment. 

The Höchst industrial park covers 460 hectares and is home to around 90 companies from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, basic and specialty chemicals, crop protection, food additives and services sectors. 

Infraserv used to supply the Hoechst Group.

When the chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate was broken up at the end of the nineties under the chairman of the board, Jürgen Dormann, it emerged as a separate company.

In Celanese - spun off via an IPO - those remnants of Hoechst Grundchemie that the conglomerate had not previously sold were absorbed.

Clariant comprises essential parts of the old Hoechst specialty chemicals, in Aventis Hoechst's pharmaceutical businesses were merged with those of Rhone-Poulencs;

Aventis was later taken over by Sanofi.