DowDuPont Completes Business Swap for FMC’s Health and Nutrition Business
DowDuPont, the newly combined company of The Dow Chemical Company and DuPont, has closed on a previously announced business swap with FMC Corporation under which FMC is acquiring a portion of the former DuPont crop protection business and DowDuPont is acquiring FMC’s health and nutrition business, which includes its excipient business.
FMC and DuPont announced the business swap in March 2017 as part of a requirement by then DuPont to divest a portion of its crop-protection business as a condition with the European Commission for its merger with Dow Chemical. DuPont and Dow Chemical had announced their merger in December 2015, and the companies closed on their merger in August 2017 to form the combined company, DowDuPont.
As part of its business swap, FMC has acquired DuPont’s global chewing pest insecticide portfolio, its global cereal broadleaf herbicide business, and a substantial portion of DuPont’s global crop-protection research and development capabilities. In turn, DuPont (now DowDuPont) has acquired FMC’s health and nutrition business and has received $1.2 billion in cash. FMC’s health and nutrition business generated more than $700 million in revenues in 2016 from two main segments: texturants as food ingredients and pharmaceutical excipients.
DowDuPont has three divisions (Agriculture, Materials Science, and Specialty Products) with plans to separate each business into independent companies over the next 18 months. The Specialty Products Company will house the company’s pharmaceutical ingredients business, including excipients.
DowDuPont plans to continue to satisfy conditional regulatory clearances required of the merger transaction. DowDuPont expects to close its $1.1-billion divestiture of a select portion of Dow AgroSciences’ corn-seed business to CITIC Agri Fund in Brazil in the fourth quarter of 2017.
