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ZF Merger With TRW Gets Green Light

Issued at 2015-05-26



German car-parts supplier secures EU approval for $13.5 billion acquisition of U.S. rival.

BRUSSELS—German car-parts supplier ZF Friedrichshafen secured European Union approval for its $13.5 billion acquisition of U.S. rival TRW Automotive, subject to conditions, clearing a key hurdle to creating the world’s second largest automotive supplier by sales. 

The European Commission, the bloc’s top antitrust authority, said on Thursday that the deal could go ahead provided that ZF sells TRW’s chassis components businesses in the European Economic Area.

The merger, announced in September, will create an automotive parts supplier with potential annual revenue of about $41 billion, ranked No. 2 after Germany’s Robert Bosch GmbH and ahead of Japan’s Denso Corp.

The commission had concerns that the deal as notified “could have led to price increases for chassis components because the few remaining players in this market would have been unable to sufficiently constrain the merged entity,” the regulator said in a statement.

The asset sale, proposed by ZF, will address those concerns, the regulator said.


Source: The Wall Street Journal



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