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Platform Specialty Products in Talks to Buy Arysta

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Platform Specialty Products Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire rival Arysta LifeScience Ltd. for about $3.5 billion including debt, according to people familiar with the matter. A deal between the two companies could be reached in the next few weeks unless the talks fall apart, the people said.

Private-equity-owned Arysta makes fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. The company was created in 2001 when two agricultural-chemical businesses were spun out of Japanese trading houses and merged. Buyout firm Permira acquired Arysta from another investment firm in 2008 for about $2.2 billion.

Arysta, which is now based in Dublin, filed paperwork with U.S. regulators in September to lay the groundwork for an initial public stock offering. The company, which offers some 3,600 products, had sales of $1.5 billion in 2013, it said in the filing.

Platform Specialty has made a number of acquisitions already. Last year, it paid about $1.8 billion for MacDermid Inc., which makes specialty chemicals for industrial and electronic uses. In April, Platform Specialty agreed to buy Chemtura’s agricultural-chemical business for around $1 billion. It has also bought agrochemicals group Agriphar.

This would be Platform’s biggest acquisition to date and it would roughly double the company’s market value.