Valspar Corp. said Tuesday that it plans to buy a three-generation family business in Italy that makes industrial paint, powder and other coatings for manufacturers across Europe.
By purchasing the 79-year-old Inver Holdings Srl, Minneapolis-based Valspar gains a firm with $200 million in annual sales and a wide range of European manufacturing customers that use Inver paints to make automobiles, large earth-moving equipment, railways, aluminum windows and vehicle parts.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter and should help expand Valspar's presence in Europe's $6 billion coatings industry, officials said.
Inver is based in Bologna, Italy, and serves customers there, in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland.
The purchase is expected to be a hand-in-glove fit for Valspar, which generates about $4 billion a year making and selling paint, industrial and food-can coatings for firms around the globe. Valspar has operations in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Norway, Germany, Spain, Australia, China and 22 other nations.
Its U.K. presence is relatively new and the Inver deal should broaden that nicely, analysts said. In November, Valspar struck a partnership agreement with British retailer B&Q that allowed Valspar to sell its paint in England and Ireland. B&Q is a unit of Kingfisher PLC, which is the third-largest do-it-yourself retail chain in the world. Adding Inver will give Valspar heft in the United Kingdom.
Valspar CEO Gary Hendrickson called Inver a "strong fit with Valspar's culture" and said its addition is "consistent with the growth strategy of our industrial coatings business."
Inver CEO Giovanni Domenichini said in a statement that he was equally delighted with the idea of merging into Valspar's much larger operation. "This combination is an important step toward developing a market-leading presence in Europe that also will be a platform for truly superior global growth in our industrial coatings business," he said.
