The Lubrizol Corp. has acquired Nalco Performance Products Group, the personal care and household care specialty polymers and formulation additives business of Nalco Company. Nalco reportedly is selling its personal care and home care business in order to focus on its core industrial water, energy and air applications business.
“Our personal care business is more product-oriented than service oriented and not a strategic fit with our emphasis on providing sustainability services for industrial water, energy and air applications,” explained J. Erik Fyrwald, Nalco chairman and CEO, in a press statement.
This acquisition, structured as an asset sale, will expand Lubrizol’s Noveon Consumer Specialties home and personal care portfolio, including rheology modifiers and thickeners, fixative polymers, specialty surfactants, emollient esters, unique sensory modifiers and cationic cassia conditioning polymers, to now include Nalco's specialty polymers and formulation additives.
“The joining of our two personal care product lines creates a portfolio of industry-leading technologies that will help make our combined customers more successful through expanded access to innovative ingredients, formulations and applications knowledge,” commented Eric Schnur, president of Lubrizol Advanced Materials, in a company press release.
The agreement includes all Nalco personal care dedicated technology, know-how, application knowledge, intellectual property, trade names, customer lists and relationships, and base business, as well as royalty-free access to the use of technology and intellectual property currently shared with other Nalco businesses.
With this acquisition, Lubrizol will also be assuming approximately 15 full-time employees, and it is expected that all Nalco personal care products will be transitioned to Lubrizol over the next six months. The Nalco personal care brand names will be retained and unified under the Noveon Consumer Specialties product line. The deal closed on Jan. 21, 2011, and the acquisition will be accretive in the first year.
