Nippon Paint will acquire AkzoNobel’s Southeast Asian decorative paints business for $1.35 billion, taking control of operations across seven markets and expanding its position in a major construction-materials segment. The transaction was announced by AkzoNobel on Monday as the Dutch coatings maker completed a review of its Asian decorative paints portfolio.
The deal covers decorative paints operations in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Papua New Guinea and Australia. AkzoNobel said it expects net cash proceeds of about $1 billion after tax and payments to minority partners.
The transaction will not close as a single deal. AkzoNobel said the Indonesia transaction is expected to be completed separately in late 2026, while the remaining transactions are expected to close around the middle of 2027. The company did not disclose separate valuations for the individual country operations.
The sale marks another major change in AkzoNobel’s Asian decorative-paints portfolio. The Dulux paintmaker had earlier divested its decorative paints operations in India and Pakistan for $1.6 billion and 50 million euros, respectively. With the latest agreement, the company is continuing to reduce its exposure to selected decorative-paints assets while focusing on other parts of its global portfolio.
“The successful completion of our Asia portfolio review is part of an ongoing strategy to focus our portfolio on areas where we can achieve differentiating scale and strengthen our position,” AkzoNobel Chief Executive Greg Poux-Guillaume said in a statement.
For Nippon Paint, the acquisition adds a large regional group of decorative-paints businesses spanning residential and construction-related markets. Decorative paints are closely linked to housing completion, refurbishment and commercial development, making control over manufacturing, distribution and brands significant to competition in the building-materials industry. The supplied announcement did not disclose the acquired businesses’ revenue, production capacity, workforce or individual market shares.
The agreement follows several approaches by Nippon Paint for AkzoNobel’s decorative-paints business. AkzoNobel said Nippon Paint submitted multiple proposals in July, valuing the business at about €7.5 billion, or $8.44 billion. That interest came after the withdrawal in June of a €12.5 billion bid for the entire company that Nippon Paint had pursued jointly with US-based paintmaker Sherwin-Williams.
The Southeast Asian transaction is also part of a wider restructuring of corporate portfolios in the global coatings industry. The Financial Times, which had earlier reported the deal, said Nippon Paint remained interested in a larger transaction involving AkzoNobel’s decorative-paints business. AkzoNobel, however, does not plan to sell further assets from that business, according to the report cited by Reuters.
AkzoNobel said its immediate focus would now shift to completing its merger with US coatings maker Axalta. The merger was announced in November last year. The company’s next operational milestones for the paints divestment will be the separate Indonesia closing expected in late 2026 and the completion of the remaining transactions around mid-2027.