Samsung Expresses Interest in Buying Fokker
Samsung Corp., South Korea’s largest industrial company, said Monday that it is considering buying part or all of Dutch aircraft maker Fokker, which is under court protection from its creditors.
“We are very much interested in Fokker,” Park Jong Hyun, a spokesman for Samsung Aerospace Co., said in Seoul. “But we have not decided anything on buying the company.”
A union of the two would give Fokker a partner with great financial resources and provide Samsung access to the Dutch company’s technology.
At Fokker’s Amsterdam headquarters, spokesman Leo Steijn said the company received a fax from Samsung over the weekend expressing the conglomerate’s interest.
“We take every interest seriously,” Steijn said. “But talks will show where it will lead.” He declined to specify whether Samsung is interested in all or parts of the company.
It is the first time Fokker has identified a potential bidder for its assets.
Fokker filed for suspension of payments last week after Daimler-Benz, its biggest shareholder, stopped support. On Friday, it received a $218-million temporary bailout package from the Dutch government, its second-biggest shareholder.
A partnership could guarantee Fokker’s participation in a $2-billion South Korea-China project to design and build a 100-seat airliner.
As part of Daimler-Benz Aerospace, Daimler’s aerospace unit known as Dasa, Fokker was bidding for a 20% stake in the venture, but that participation seems unlikely now that Daimler has dropped Fokker.
For Samsung, buying Fokker would give it a clear advantage in its wrangle with China over who should lead the jet-building project.
“If it acquires Fokker, Samsung will be able to match China in terms of technology,” said Lee Jong Seung, senior aviation researcher at the Daewoo Economic Research Institute, a private think tank.
Samsung Aerospace, the company’s aircraft arm, heads the South Korean group that has teamed up with China’s Aviation Industries Corp. to build the jet.
Park said Seattle-based Boeing Co. and a consortium of European aircraft makers are now favored over the two other bidders, Dasa and St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas Corp. The Chinese and South Korean governments delayed announcing details of the project last year, including a third partner, because each said the main assembly plant, the most profitable process, should be located in its country.
