Billionaire Dědek cleans in the Jablotron. He wants to sell one of the holding’s profitable companies
The founder of the entire holding, Dalibora Dědek, is considering selling one of Jablotron’s companies. The company JabloPCB, which specializes in the assembly of printed circuit boards and final assembly, wants to find possible interested parties.
According to him, it is still premature to talk about the price, but it will not be low, hundreds of millions of crowns are saved in production technologies alone.
The possible sale of the company, which employs over two hundred people and installs around sixty million components annually, is the result of a “cleaning” in the holding company. Dědek returned to its management after several years of silence two years ago, when he replaced his partner Miroslav Jarolím.
He subsequently had to pay his forty percent share. “When I came back, the Jablotron Group had twenty-eight entities. During the era of Mr. Jarolím, it swelled noticeably, and unfortunately, when a colleague got into health problems, the companies stopped coordinating with each other, and that is not a completely optimal model,” explains the founder of the group.
JabloPCB thus gradually bought expensive technology and lines that serve a different type of production than they need in Jablotron. For example, it involves expensive selective soldering, which internal Jablotron customers use little.
In the end, the philosophy of the company came to a mode where production for foreign customers prevailed. “And even when we then needed to produce something ourselves as a priority, the priority did not succeed and we had to produce elsewhere. Losing meaning,” adds Dalibor Dědek.
The idea of selling was further strengthened by the fact that Jablotron also suffered from a lack of chips last year. Therefore, they had to move a larger volume of production to China, where critical items could be obtained more easily.
“That’s why we decided to try to market JabloPCB. We will be selling a vital, functioning company that does just something else than we need ourselves,” he points out. After all, in the past four years it was among the three most profitable holding companies.
According to the available annual reports from 2021, its turnover two years ago was 615 million crowns and profit before taxation was forty-five million crowns. “It always depends on whether the added value of the products can be sold. The company has the advantage that it is not built only for simple production, but also has a very strong technical background for the refinement of products,” urged Dědek.
In addition, the company will move to a new, modern hall for one hundred million crowns. The original one was destroyed by fire two years ago, and in the end, its restoration required almost the same amount, which, according to Dalibor Dędek, it stood for. Another investment was the restoration of the production lines that were damaged by the fire. At the same time, the insurance company reimbursed only part of the damage, namely it was caused by the company’s own operation when the small button lithium batteries caught fire.
Some people interested in JabloPCB had already appeared before the end of last year. To whom and whether Jablotron eventually sells the company will depend on the offers. However, it is important for Dědek that production remains in the Czech Republic. He is not very happy with the fact that the entire Western world is completely dependent on whether or not it is made in China.
“The lack of chips destroyed us in the last year. We cannot afford not to supply the market because our distribution network would collapse. So we got into a situation where we produced some of our products for seven times the price,” reveals Dalibor Dědek.
And that’s also because small chips, which normally cost seventy cents, had to pay up to forty dollars a piece on the spot market. “For a few months last year, we really had to grind our teeth a lot. We did maintain sales, but at the cost of making losses on a number of items,” he adds.
The biggest crisis and purchases were in the summer, when the supply of key components to the sports market dropped out. However, the situation has slightly improved in recent months.