In conjunction with the business divestiture following the Praxair-Linde merger, both Praxair and Linde agreed that the consortium of German Messer and CVC Capital Partners Fund VII would purchase most of Linde’s North American gas business and part of the South American businesses. The amount of purchase would be US$3.3 billion (equivalent to €2.8 billion or JPY360.5 billion).

　The applicable business assets to purchase include Linde’s bulk gas business in the US and the businesses in Brazil and Columbia, of which scale as a whole in 2017 is valued at about US$1.7 billion (equivalent to about €1.4 billion or JPY180.2 billion) in sales, and US$360 million (equivalent to €305 million or JPY39.2 billion) in EBITDA with about 5 thousand employees. After the official transfer the joint venture of Messer and CVC Fund VII will be named MG Industries, and the business will be operated under the Messer brand.

Messer’s businesses in the European countries (Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, France, the Benelux countries, Denmark and Germany having 780 employees and annual sales of €334 million equivalent to about JPY43 billion) will be associated into MG Industries. The completion of transfer will be subject to the establishment of merger of Praxair and Linde to be approved by the relevant regulatory authorities.

　Messer is a long-established company headquartered in Hessen, Germany since about 120 years ago and is the world largest owner-operator company run by the Messer family.

The total sales in 2017 amounted to a little over €1.2 billion (approx.JPY154.5 billion) with a regional sales ranking of Europe (West, Middle and East Europe) accounting for 60%, China for 30% and ASEAN (Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia) with added Peru for less than 10%. In the US Messer’s group company ASCO Carbon Dioxide is doing business dealing with the dry ice shot blasting machine and so on.

According to a simple calculation of total sales of 2017 plus M&A, the business scale amounts to €2.6 billion (equivalent to about JPY334.7 billion), which is ranked No. 6 of the world retaining its rank next to No. 5 of Taiyo Nippon Sanso.