Gildemeister AG and Mori Seiki get closer together

Following an announcement earlier this year, Mori Seiki is to take an additional 5.4% of Gildemeister AG by acquiring newly issued shares - 3,247,162 new bearer shares of common stock without par value for € 17.5063/share. This, says Mori Seiki, will give the Japanese firm voting rights equivalent to 24.9%. (The company had shares equivalent to 20.1% of voting rights prior to this, according to Gildemeister AG's 2012 annual report.) In exchange for these shares, Mori Seiki is contributing 19.0% of the shares in its subsidiary Mori Seiki Manufacturing USA Inc, Davis, California, USA, as well as 44.1% of the shares in its subsidiary Magnescale Co Ltd, Kanagawa, Japan as contributions in kind. Says Mori Seiki: "There will be no relocation of subsidiaries or sub-subsidiaries due to this contribution in kind." Gildemeister AG also has a 5.1% shareholding in Mori Seiki, according to the Japanese company's 2013 annual financial report. The announcement made by Gildemeister AG says that through these shareholdings, it is "gaining access to production capacities of the highly modern machine tool manufacturing plant built by Mori Seiki in the USA, as well as to the high precision position measurement technology of Magnescale Co Ltd, Kanagawa (Japan). The latter technology makes it possible to measure tool positioning to the picometer, allowing high-precision handling of production objects". A further capital increase is to follow this one, after which Mori Seiki will hold 24.3% of Gildemeister's share capital, says Gildemeister AG. Co-operation between the two companies has been in place since March 2009. See Machinery feature here for more detail.