DuPont acquires big Danish firm
DuPont Co., in a continuing move to expand beyond its traditional base of making industrial chemicals, said Monday it had won control of Danisco A/S after getting 92.2 percent of the Danish food-ingredient maker's shares.
DuPont Co., in a continuing move to expand beyond its traditional base of making industrial chemicals, said Monday it had won control of Danisco A/S after getting 92.2 percent of the Danish food-ingredient maker's shares.
DuPont's offer for Danisco was $6.36 billion.
The transaction is DuPont chief executive officer Ellen Kullman's first major acquisition since she started in the job two years ago, giving her the world's biggest maker of food additives and the second-biggest industrial-enzymes producer.
Kullman raised the friendly bid by $500 million, or 5.3 percent, on April 29 after failing to win enough support for the initial offer. The revised proposal won backing from Danish institutional investors.
"It's another feather in Ellen's cap," Hassan Ahmed, a New York-based analyst at Alembic Global Advisers, said in a telephone interview. "She showed some discipline and didn't bow down."
Kullman is expanding beyond such DuPont mainstays as Kevlar bullet-resistant fabric and titanium-dioxide pigment used in paint. Danisco's ingredients business makes sweeteners and cultures for ice cream and cheese, while its enzymes unit, the second-biggest producer after Denmark's Novozymes A/S, supplies the biofuels industry.
Danisco and Wilmington-based DuPont already share a venture that makes ethanol from corn cobs and switchgrass.
DuPont's agriculture and nutrition unit is the second-biggest seed company behind Monsanto Co. and Danisco will bolster the part of the division making soy protein and other food ingredients.
"This looks like a smart way to reposition a segment that needed to be repositioned," Mark Connelly, a New York-based analyst at Credit Agricole SA, said last week. "It dramatically distinguishes them in the agriculture segment from Monsanto."
DuPont shares gained 1 cent to close at $52.92 on the New York Stock Exchange.
DuPont is buying Danisco for 32 percent more than its closing share price Jan. 7, the last trading day before DuPont announced its takeover intention.
The price is 21 times Danisco's estimated earnings per share in the year through April 2012, according to the average profit projections of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
The deal is DuPont's largest takeover since the 1999 acquisition of the genetically modified seed-maker Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. for $7.7 billion.