CRH Agrees to Buy Holcim-Lafarge Assets for $7.3 Billion
(Bloomberg) — CRH Plc, the Irish building-materials company, said it has entered a binding agreement to buy assets that cement makers Holcim Ltd. and Lafarge SA need to sell ahead of their planned merger.
The deal has an enterprise value of 6.5 billion euros ($7.3 billion) and will be funded by a combination of cash on balance sheet, new debt and a 9.99% equity placing, CRH said in an e- mailed statement on Sunday.
Full details of the acquisition will be released later, according to the statement.
The Irish company, which is partnering with KKR & Co., last month confirmed it was in talks with Lafarge and Holcim about a potential purchase of assets. A deal would allow Dublin-based CRH to move into new markets and expand its presence in existing ones.
The builder, which was formed in 1970 through the merger of two Irish companies, already operates in 35 countries with about 76,000 people and has about 18 billion euros in sales, according to its website.
Holcim and Lafarge are seeking to divest businesses with revenue of about 5 billion euros to ensure regulatory approval for the deal. The companies expect the $40 billion merger, agreed on in April 2014, to be completed in the first half of this year.
–With assistance from Matthew Campbell in London and Joe Brennan in Dublin.
To contact the reporters on this story: Manuel Baigorri in London at mbaigorri@bloomberg.net; Aaron Kirchfeld in London at akirchfeld@bloomberg.net; Francois de Beaupuy in Paris at fdebeaupuy@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Simon Thiel at sthiel1@bloomberg.net Mike Harrison, James Herron
