Victoria PLC, a British flooring group listed on the London Stock Exchange AIM market, has announced the sale of its Izmir-based tile manufacturer Graniser, which it acquired in 2021. The transaction has been valued at €36.8m (£30.32m) and is being paid roughly one third in cash with the remainder assumed as debt. The buyer, Hasan Akgün, is the founder of the Akgün Group, a Turkish conglomerate operating in sectors such as ceramics and building materials, automotive, logistics and oil which employs over 5,000 people across 17 factories.
The deal is said to be part of a strategy to improve the UK group’s profitability, further enforced by a long-term supply agreement with the buyer to procure tiles at production cost prices.
Graniser has reportedly been negatively impacted by instability in several key markets. For Victoria, which already operates in the ceramic tile sector in Italy and Spain, the investment in Graniser three years ago was driven by the desire to diversify the group’s ceramic tile manufacturing footprint into a lower energy, labour and raw material price environment. With the stipulated manufactured-cost supply agreement, the company says it will maintain this strategy while freeing up capital to redeploy into other business areas.
Victoria’s ceramics division (UK & Europe ceramic tiles) ended the first half of the 2025 fiscal year (to 28 September 2024) with a sales volume of 17.4m sqm (-4.9% on the same period of the previous year), earnings of £151.4m (-9%).
www.victoriaplc.com