Tronox sees revenues jump in the fourth quarter
STAMFORD — Chemicals and minerals maker Tronox, which last year completed a $1.7 billion acquisition of the titanium dioxide business of Saudi Arabian firm Cristal, reported a jump in returns for the past quarter and year.
Reflecting the company’s expansion, fourth-quarter revenues spiked about 62 percent year over year, to $693 million.
Its quarterly bottom line was “nil.” Revenues were offset by a number of factors including operational expenses, transactional and restructuring costs, a loss on the “extinguishment” of debt and a charge for a capital-gains tax payment.
For all of 2019, Tronox’s revenues leaped 45 percent, to about $2.64 billion. A loss for the year of $109 million was influenced by factors similar to the ones that affected the quarterly bottom line.
“2019 marked a transformative year for Tronox with the close of the Cristal acquisition,” Tronox CEO and Chairman Jeffry Quinn said in a statement this week. “As the world’s largest vertically integrated titanium dioxide producer with an unmatched global footprint, we continue to grow with our customers as they grow anywhere in the world and benefit from our alignment with customers growing faster than the overall market.”
The deal with Cristal originated in February 2017, but the Federal Trade Commission litigated for about a year-and-a-half to block the agreement, arguing that it would reduce competition for titanium dioxide, a bright-white substance used as a colorant in many consumer and industrial products.
Last April, Tronox finally gained the FTC’s approval by agreeing to the $700 million sale of Cristal’s North American titanium dioxide business — whose manufacturing is based in Ashtabula, Ohio — to British chemicals firm Ineos Enterprises.
Tronox had previously explored a sale of the Ashtabula complex to titanium dioxide manufacturer Venator Materials. But the two firms could not agree to terms.
Venator was also the buyer of Tronox’s Rotterdam, Netherlands-supplied paper-laminate line. Worth about $8 million, that deal was completed last year to secure the European Commission’s support of the titanium dioxide acquisition. Tronox was already a major titanium dioxide producer, with its largest such plant in Hamilton, Miss.
Before closing the Cristal deal, Tronox employed about 3,400 worldwide, with its headquarters at 263 Tresser Blvd., in downtown Stamford.
While its main offices remain in Stamford, Tronox has said that it would base about 30 percent of its personnel in South Africa, 15 percent in both Europe and Australia and 10 percent, respectively, in east Asia, the Middle East and North America and South America.