Throughout Vedior’s history, our network has grown continuously through a combination of both organic initiatives and the acquisition of new businesses.
During 2007, Vedior continued its active programme of organic expansion and made eight major acquisitions. The number of countries the Group operates in increased from 48 in 2006 to 50, with the addition of Thailand and Angola to our network, by the end of 2007.
Organic expansion
Within established markets, Vedior continues to launch new sectors to broaden our service offering in local markets and also provide a platform for long-term organic growth.
We continued to expand our permanent placement activities in many of our markets as an area of significant growth this year.
In the UK, Select Hospitality, which specialises in finding permanent opportunities for supervisors, managers and senior personnel in hotels, bars and restaurants, opened several new offices this year nationwide.
In the USA, we expanded our legal staffing services with the opening of two new project staging centres for legal document retrieval and review, and we now offer the largest staging capacity for legal projects in the USA. We also extended our recruitment process outsourcing activities in the USA and Canada.
We expanded our engineering/technical division in Australia, where we also rolled out our Vedior1 premium managed service programme, which allows larger clients to easily access and coordinate their supply needs through a single specialist contact within our organisation.
Existing operations in the Middle East increased capacity through new office openings, and our African businesses also launched additional services this year. We also continued our active organic growth programme including expansion of existing operations in France, Latin America, mainland China and Thailand.
Acquisitions
Vedior continued to actively seek suitable acquisition opportunities in line with our objective to further diversify our business mix and increase the proportion of sales and profitability derived from professional and executive recruitment.
In line with our stated strategy, we normally acquire majority stakes in companies with local management retaining a minority interest (see table below). In addition to these acquisitions, Vedior also made a number of smaller investments, including some where the Group already held a majority interest, during the course of the year.
The combined consideration for acquisitions in 2007 was €126 million (2006:€157 million).
