Ineos is to buy Lanxess’s ˆ900m Lustran Polymers ABS business in a two-stage, two-year deal which takes the privately owned UK chemicals and plastics group into new territory.
Under the first stage, Ineos will pay Lustran ˆ35m for a 51% stake in the business; the second tranche will be valued depending on the performance of the business over the period. All of the pension liabilities, totalling ˆ30m, will be transferred to the joint venture which is being formed.
The Lustran business, which employs 1,600 people, turned in an EBITDA of ˆ16m last year and is expected to make ˆ40m in the current year. It has plants in Germany, Spain, Thailand, India and the US. Lanxess has been seeking a partner for the operation for some time but was thought to have had a Far Eastern focus in view.
“The joint venture provides Ineos with strong market positions in a new portfolio of products that complement our styrenic, polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC plastics activities,” Ineos chairman Jim Ratcliffe says in a statement issued this morning.
The move to buy Lustran Polymers follows Ineos’s recent announcements of take-overs of PVC maker Hydro Polymers and Borealis’s Norwegian polyolefins business. The deal requires approval by the relevant anti trust authorities.
