Long Haul

Astorg Partners is one of the oldest and most renowned French private equity firms. Chairman Xavier Moreno says keeping an eye on the long game is key to its reputation

Successful private equity investment means thinking ahead – and sometimes investing for corporate growth over many years. In 2007, Astorg backed the primary buy-out of calibration business Trescal from Air Liquide. 

The deal value was in the €30m region, and it was a turnaround situation. The company was actually an aggregation of traditional family-owned service companies and divisions of large groups, which at some point had been externalised. 

Calibration is a people business. Those employees that had come to Trescal from larger companies had better expenses, for instance in the day rates when they were travelling, or hotel expenses. The social benefits of the employees originally from smaller owner-manager type businesses were also not as good as those of their colleagues who had joined from larger corporates. 

So, when we took over there was a tension with the unions, because their request for a unified regime had remained unanswered for years due to the poor performance of the division. If everyone were upgraded to the 100% level of reimbursement, the costs would have significantly increased the loss. 

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