In the autumn of 2018 the merger of German Linde and US Praxair became actualized, and the world industrial gas market is bound to be led by the combined two of newly born Linde and Air Liquide, followed by Air Products and Taiyo Nippon Sanso.

After the oligopoly of the world market by five majors of French Air Liquide, British BOC (now Linde) , Union Carbide (now Praxair) and Air Products of USA and Swedish AGA since the beginning of 1980 having respective regional features basically, the world market saw the start of reorganization of the majors at the end of 1990s with the surfacing proposed acquisition of second-ranked BOC by other majors, bottom-ranked German Linde’s acquisition of the upper-ranked AGA and further attempt to buy German Messer (failed).

In and after 2000 some uncompetitive international gas majors were weeded out as seen in Linde’s acquisition of BOC, Air Liquide’s purchasing Airgas of the US leading distributor and the merger of Linde and Praxair in 2018 as mentioned above.

On the other hand, the business scale of the international major including Taiyo Nippon Sanso keeps a 5-fold growth from US$12 billion in 1987, US$25.1 billion in 1997, US$50.8 billion in 2007 and US$63.8 billion in 2017 (converted at the exchange rate at that time).

While the market is getting matured leading to a stagnation status causing difficulty to develop a new application, the market is looking for expanding new business with mutual complements by M&A.