Wintergerst supports NAGEL, a manufacturer of machines and tools, in its acquisition of the Gehring Group

Wintergerst Societät für Unternehmer-Beratung provided a comprehensive suite of advisory services to NAGEL, a family-owned company, during the acquisition of the Gehring Group.

The NAGEL Group, a specialist in superfinishing and honing technologies based in Nürtingen, won approval to take over the Gehring Group based in Ostfildern, which was up for auction after becoming insolvent. With this acquisition, NAGEL reinforces its global market reach and anchors its positioning as a reliable and innovative partner to the automobile industry.

The NAGEL Group came relatively late to the transaction process at the end of September 2020 and therefore faced an extremely ambitious time plan. Thanks to its familiarity with the market and the short decision paths within the family-owned enterprise, NAGEL was able to submit a qualified offer for the Gehring Group at extremely short notice with assistance from the team of M&A specialists at Wintergerst.

Looking back at the transaction process, Bernd Nagel, the managing shareholder of the NAGEL Group says: “We are proud to welcome Gehring as a new member to our group of companies. At the same time, we have a lot of respect for the challenges lying ahead of us, which we will now address with the utmost care in order to create a foundation for a sustainable business solution.” With a view to the transaction process, he adds: “The past four weeks were very intensive for all of us and we are impressed at how rapidly and professionally the Wintergerst M&A team managed to obtain an understanding of the situation at Gehring which they then used with great skill to lead us through the transaction process with the insolvency administrator.”

Christian Kunz, a partner at Wintergerst and senior expert in the engineering sector: “For us, the opportunity to accompany the transaction was an exciting challenge as the technical profiles of the two companies complement each other brilliantly. From our perspective, the combination makes a great deal of sense in light of the competitive developments on the market and the industrial logic behind it. Moreover, the combination lays the groundwork for the group to become a stable global player in the field of honing machines.”

Volker Wintergerst, managing partner at Wintergerst Societät, who led the negotiations with the vendors, adds: “It made us very happy that the third generation of shareholders at Nagel, a family-owned and operated company, entrusted us to assist it with such a fundamental decision for its way forward. The extremely ambitious time line of just five weeks presented us with major challenges. This makes us all the happier that our experienced team, with its skills set focused on M&A, due diligence and restructuring, was able to make such a valuable contribution to the success of the transaction.”

The insolvency administrator of the Gehring Group, Tobias Wahl, from anchor Rechtsanwälte, is happy to have found, in the NAGEL Group, such a perfect match and stable partner to lead the Gehring Group out of the crisis and be able to realize the complex transaction process in the very ambitious time schedule.