DuPont Co.'s car paint business has been sold to investment
firm Carlyle Group for $4.9 billion cash, which at the moment has unknown
repercussions for the resin line at DuPont's Fort Madison, Iowa, plant.
The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013, and affect
11,000 DuPont employees. Of the 150 employees at the Fort Madison facility,
about 50 work on the resin line, which falls under the transaction.
"We are in the process of sorting through all the implications of how
this decision will affect the Fort Madison site," said Fort Madison plant
manager Warren Hoy.
The Fort Madison plant has three lines: a digital printing line that
makes inks for computer printers, a specialties line that makes dyes for
Kevlar fabric used in military clothing and the resin line. The resins are
shipped to other DuPont facilities to be used in paints for the automotive
industry.
"We will be making resin today, resin tomorrow and resin in the future,"
Hoy said.
What will be figured out in time will be whether the employees on the
resin line will stay in Fort Madison but work for Carlyle or the jobs will be
shipped to another location.
"We anticipate that a new organization will be formed for that unit, and
the employees assigned to that unit will become employees of a new company
owned by the Carlyle Group," Hoy said in a statement. "We expect to begin a
process to staff the new organization soon. This transition will take some
time."
The sale concluded an eight-month auction of the DuPont Performance
Coatings division. Carlyle, a Washington, D.C.-based firm, outbid Apollo
Global Management and a consortium of KKR & Co. and Onex Corp. The DuPont
division is expected to generate $4 billion in revenues this year. Ford Motor
Co., General Motors Co., Maaco and other auto paint refinishers are a few of
the division's key customers. Carlyle will assume $250 million of DuPont's
unfunded pension liabilities.
Carlyle, a global asset manager, has expertise in various fields such as
industrial, technology, business services, defense and government services and
many other industries.
According to Thomson Reuters data, Carlyle has done 12 private equity
deals in 2012 totaling $15.3 billion in transaction volume.
