Lanco Paint and Pintuco are separately doing deals involving the Colombian paint market, with Miami-based Lanco targeting the domestic market and Bogota-based Pintuco targeting the Costa Rica market. The Lanco deal, a new joint venture with Corona, was not valued publicly. The $10 million Pintuco deal, involving the purchase of Naranjo, Costa Rica-based Vastalux, will include a $5 million refurbishment of the latter’s manufacturing facility.

Lanco partners with Corona

Lanco’s new joint venture with Colombia’s Organizacion Corona will serve both as a means for the former to reach the Colombian market, and later, for the venture to serve other South American markets, according to Rubin Irizarry, a purchasing agent at Lanco Manufacturing, in San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico. Corona will hold 55 percent of the equity of the new venture, and Lanco will hold 45 percent, according to a company statement in Colombia. Among Corona subsidiaries is the Sodimac hardware chain, broadly present in the Colombian retail market.
Lanco manufactures paint in the United States and the Caribbean, including Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The company has 32 retail locations in Puerto Rico, its regional headquarters for Latin America. The company also maintains several distribution centers in Central America.

Pintuco acquires Vasalux

Colombia’s Grupo Mundial unit Compañía Global de Pinturas, which owns the Pintuco brand, is making the purchase of Vastalux to better serve the Central American paint market, which the company estimates at over 30 million gallons per year. The company already exports an estimated $70 million worth of paint per year to South American markets in Brazil and Peru, and Central American markets in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama. The company also has begun exports to several countries in Africa; the company exports to nearly 30 countries overall.

By next year, the Costa Rican facility will serve all Central American paint markets except Panama, which will continue to be supplied from Colombia, where the company has a plant at Rionegro, in Antioquia. Vastalux, which produces an estimated 1.5 million gallons per year, has a work force of about 50 employees in Costa Rica, to which Pintuco will add staff in 2012. The company estimates that the paint market in Costa Rica is over seven million gallons of paint per year.

Global de Pinturas currently manufactures 27 million gallons of paint per year and has an estimated 4,300 employees, according to one Colombian report, with manufacturing already in position in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Dutch Antilles. The company claims leadership in the Colombian, Ecuadorian and Venezuelan paint markets. Apart from its leading Pintuco brand, Global de Pinturas holds the Pica, Pintec, Terinsa, Ico, Graniplast and Mundial brands directly or jointly with local country partners. Paint represents about 25 percent of the company’s sales—reported at $862 million in 2010—alongside other chemicals and water businesses.

Grupo Mundial, which is controlled by the Saldarriaga family, has shares held by some 180 investors from various countries. While the company is listed on the Colombia stock exchange for purposes of transparency and good governance, shares are not yet traded, according to a statement made to the Colombia press by Grupo Mundial president Ernest Fajardo Pinto, in October. Future investments might necessitate a public share issue, he noted.

Brazil is among markets Grupo Mundial is considering for an expansion of its Pintuco paint business. The group already is expanding its chemical and water businesses there.