Ball Corp's long-awaited £4.4bn takeover of fellow can maker Rexam (REX) could finally be given go ahead this summer after the pair moved closer to satisfying the last hurdle of competition requirements by agreeing to sell assets worth $3.42bn (£2.3bn) to European packaging maker Ardagh.
According to Ball, the deal involves flogging roughly a fifth of the companies' combined plants across Europe, Brazil and the US, and will be followed by the disposal of innovation and support functions in the region. It is hoped these efforts will satisfy the European Commission's earlier demands, paving the way for the merger to go through at the end of June.
Ball initially agreed to buy British rival Rexam last February in the hope of improving efficiency and cutting costs. But antitrust regulators met plans to combine the world's two largest beverage can makers by volume with caution, fearing that the enlarged entity would have too big a market share across the globe. Regulatory clearance was particularly hard to come by in Europe, as this is the region where the two companies have most overlap.
