A transaction with a US company has propelled a Belgian man and his family to the top of Belgium's rich list.
Jean-Pierre Berghmans recently sold his company Lhoist, which specialises in supplying lime and other minerals, to the American building materials group Martin Mariett for €11.8 billion.
Ludwig Verduyn, founder of the website De Rijkste Belgen, told the Flemish daily De Morgen that Jean-Pierre is now 77 and, as the patriarch of the Berghmans, "he probably felt the time was right to cash in on what he has built over the years".
Humble beginnings
VRT drew a portrait of humble beginnings for the Berghmans. The company started with a young man named Hippolyte Dumont from rural Liège, who acquired a limestone quarry and expanded his business little by little.
Dumont died after the First World War, leaving his son-in-law, Léon Lhoist. Lhoist set up a lime factory under his own name and soon expanded it into France.
The 1930s economic crisis, followed by the Second World War, put the limestone trade in difficulty. Afterwards, the company got back on its feet, expanding across the Atlantic.
Lhoist's grandson, Jean-Pierre Berghmans, steered the lime giant in the right direction from the mid-1970s, making it the thriving Walloon company it is today.
Lhoist, headquartered in Limelette, operates in more than 20 countries and employs over 6,400 people.
Value of lime
"We're a business that only sells to industry. We don't produce consumer goods," Berghmans said in a rare interview with Trends magazine in 2007. "People don't eat lime. It's a pity, because that would be fantastic for us."
Lime, as a raw material, is essential in many industries. Thomas Wyns, a researcher in industrial policy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), told De Morgen that it was what made Lhoist "a powerful company in a strategic sector".
He added that its importance is likely to grow with the rising demand for lime in semiconductor manufacturing and data centre construction, "which require large quantities of steel, metals, glass and concrete".
Wyns told De Morgen that lime production inevitably generates a large amount of carbon dioxide, and investing in carbon capture "costs hundreds of millions of euros".
"It's possible Berghmans is using this sale to provide the company with the financial resources it will need to meet those challenges in the years ahead," Wyns concluded in De Morgen.
