After months of work, Michael E. Hollingsworth II and a team of lawyers at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough have closed a deal helping AkzoNobel acquire the worldwide powder coatings division of Dow Advanced Materials.
AkzoNobel is a Dutch company that produces paints, powder coatings and specialty chemicals. Dow Chemical Co., the parent of Dow Advanced Materials, is a global company based in Midland, Mich., and was represented by its in-house counsel. Dow basically flipped the powder coatings business it acquired in 2009 as part of its $15.3 billion purchase of Philadelphia-based Rohm & Haas Co., a diverse company that produces ingredients for exterior acrylic paints, among other things. 
The deal, which was announced in November, closed June 1. According to information from AkzoNobel, the powder coatings business it acquired employs about 700 people at facilities in the United States, Europe and China and has global sales of several hundred million dollars.
The purchase price was not disclosed, but Hollingsworth called this an upper-middle-market deal. He said his firm worked with De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, a law firm based in the Netherlands, which handled competition review in the European Union.
"The most challenging thing was that the worldwide assets were in over 20 jurisdictions, I think, and so we had to figure out how to transfer these assets under the laws of the various jurisdictions in addition to having the U.S.-controlled master purchase agreement, so that part of it was pretty complex," he said.
The Nelson Mullins deal team included partners Keri Chayavadhanangkur and J. Brennan Ryan and of counsel Jason R. Wolfersberger.
Powder coatings are basically paint in a powder form, which can be used to decorate and protect everything from washing machines to architectural elements such as the 8,000 tons of steelwork on the National Aquatic Center in Beijing, known as the Water Cube, which was used during the 2008 Olympic Games in China.
The powder is electrically charged as it is sprayed onto the surface to be coated, and then baked in an oven where the particles melt and fuse into a smooth coating. Powder coatings are more environmentally friendly than liquid paints because they contain no solvents, which means reduced risks for fire and waste disposal, and because they contain no VOCs—or volatile organic compounds—which can negatively affect the environment and human health.