Paprec Acquires 80% of Brantner, Gains Four Serbian Sites
French group Paprec has signed a deal for 80 percent of the environmental division of Austria's Brantner, a company with 320 million euros in revenue. In Serbia, it gains four sites in Vojvodina.
Paprec, the French recycling and waste management group, is buying 80 percent of the environmental division of Austria’s Brantner, a business that generates more than 320 million euros in annual revenue. The agreement was signed with the Brantner family, and the deal marks Paprec’s first entry into Serbia’s waste market, where the acquired company operates at four locations.
The Brantner family keeps the remaining 20 percent stake and will continue supporting the business going forward. The financial value of the transaction has not been disclosed. Closing is subject to the usual regulatory approvals, so the change of ownership has not yet formally taken effect.
The deal does not cover the whole Austrian group. Its subject is Brantner green solutions, the environmental division, while Brantner Logistic Solutions and Brantner Real Estate remain fully owned by the family.
What Paprec Gets in Serbia
In Serbia, the company operates under the name Brantner otpadna privreda doo and runs four locations: in Novi Becej, Kovacica, Kanjiza and Opovo. All four are in Vojvodina. Its business covers waste collection, waste management and recycling, work that is mostly contracted with local municipalities and businesses in the area.
Serbia is just one part of the target. Brantner green solutions operates 65 locations and facilities across five Central and Eastern European countries, employs close to 2,500 people and serves more than 28,000 clients, including both municipalities and companies. The company was founded in 1936 and specializes in collecting, sorting, recycling and reusing waste.
Five New Markets in One Deal
Through this transaction, Paprec is entering Austria, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania and Serbia for the first time. Paprec Group’s chairman and chief executive, Matje Petitigenen, described the scope of the deal in a company statement:
This transaction is a major step in Paprec’s history. It allows us to establish a presence in five new countries and significantly strengthens our footprint in Europe.
Petitigenen will chair the acquired company, while Bernd Brantner becomes vice chairman, keeping the family both as an owner and in leadership.
Paprec also laid out what it intends to do with the network it is buying:
Through this partnership, we want to accelerate growth in Central and Eastern Europe, putting the technology and expertise our group has built over more than 30 years in recycling and waste reuse at the service of local governments and businesses in these countries.
The French group also stressed that this is a merger of two family businesses sharing the same long-term commitment to the circular economy.
How Big Is This Deal for Paprec?
Paprec had previously expanded westward and southward across Europe, into Switzerland, Spain and Italy. The purchase of Brantner’s environmental division is its first move of this size toward the east of the continent and, according to the group itself, its largest single investment since 2016, when it merged with French company Coved.
Once the deal closes, the group would have roughly 26,000 employees in 15 countries and annual revenue above 4.5 billion euros. The 320 million euros in revenue that Brantner green solutions brings makes up about 7 percent of that total, so the scale of the purchase shows up more clearly in the number of markets than in the revenue figure: five new countries at once, in a region where the French group previously had no presence at all.
When the Deal Becomes Final
The next step is approval from the relevant regulators in the countries where the company operates. Until that decision, ownership of Brantner otpadna privreda in Novi Becej, Kovacica, Kanjiza and Opovo remains unchanged, and the French side has no formal control over these locations.
For Serbia’s waste market, this is the entry of a strategic owner from a country with a developed recycling industry, not a sale between domestic firms. Paprec is taking over a ready-made network of facilities and contracts instead of building from scratch, the fastest way to enter a market where business is won through long-term arrangements with municipalities.
