Ecolab likely to buy Nalco Holding for $8 billion: report
20 Jul 2011
US cleaning products giant Ecolab Inc is expected to buy industrial water treatment company Nalco Holding Co, The Wall Street Journal reported citing unnamed sources.
The deal, which is likely to announced as early as tomorrow, will be valued at around $8 billion including debt, the paper said.
Should it succeed in buying Nalco, it would not only be Ecolab's biggest ever acquisition, and the deal would boost its revenues by around 70 per cent.
Naperville, Illinois-based Nalco, formed through the 1928 merger of Chicago Chemical Company and the Aluminum Sales Corporation, is the world's largest maker of chemicals used in water treatment and pollution control.
Its best-known product, Corexit 9500, an oil dispersant, was widely used to help clean up BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year..
If the acquisition goes through Nalco, which reported a net income of $196.2 million on revenues of $4.3 billion last year, will see new owners for the third time in its 83-year history, having been acquired by Suez of France in 1999 and later in 2003 by a consortium of buyout firms consisting of the Blackstone Group, Apollo Management and Goldman Sachs's private equity arm.