Axalta Coating Systems Ltd., a global manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of high-performance coatings systems and products.
The company’s diverse global footprint allows it to meet the needs of its customer base through an extensive sales force and technical support organization, as well as independent, locally-based distributors. The company’s scale and strong local presence are critical to its success, allowing it to leverage its technology portfolio and customer relationships globally w...
Axalta Coating Systems Ltd., a global manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of high-performance coatings systems and products.
The company’s diverse global footprint allows it to meet the needs of its customer base through an extensive sales force and technical support organization, as well as independent, locally-based distributors. The company’s scale and strong local presence are critical to its success, allowing it to leverage its technology portfolio and customer relationships globally while meeting customer demands locally.
Segments
The company operates its business in two operating segments, Performance Coatings and Mobility Coatings, serving four end-markets globally.
Performance Coatings segment
Through its Performance Coatings segment, the company provides sustainable liquid and powder coating solutions to both large regional and global customers and to a fragmented and local customer base. These customers comprise, among others, independent or multi-shop operator body shops, as well as a wide variety of industrial manufacturers. The company is one of only a few suppliers with the technology to provide precise color matching and highly durable coatings systems. The end-markets within this segment are refinish and industrial.
Performance Coatings End-Markets
Refinish
Sales in the refinish end-market are driven by the number of vehicle collisions, owners' propensity to repair their vehicles, the number of miles vehicle owners drive and the size of the car parc. The company develops, markets, and supplies a complete portfolio of innovative coatings systems and color matching technologies to facilitate faster automotive collision repairs relative to competing technologies. The company’s color matching technology provides Axalta-specific formulations that enable body shops to accurately match thousands of vehicle colors, regardless of vehicle brand, color, age or supplier of the original paint during production. It would be time consuming and costly for a new entrant to create such an extensive color inventory.
Industrial
The industrial end-market comprises liquid, e-coat and powder coatings used in a broad array of end-business applications. Within the industrial end-market, the company focuses on the following:
Building Products: Focused on the North America market, offering leading innovation for performance, style, and durability in liquid coatings serving the OEMs and aftermarket building markets, including external finishes, kitchen cabinets, flooring, and furniture.
Construction: Global solutions in liquid and powder coatings for applications, such as window frames, structural steel, steel roofing, and metal building materials, typically used in residential, industrial, commercial, and monumental buildings. Coil coaters benefit from the company’s performance solutions for applications serving customers producing buildings, as well as appliances, lighting, garage doors, HVAC systems, and trailers. Architects and designers can benefit from the advice of color experts, superior technical service and the latest trend collections available in the company’s dedicated color experience rooms and digital tools.
Battery Solutions: New innovative technologies in liquid and powder coatings for battery performance, insulation and conduction to enable innovation in the electrification and energy transition market. These new innovative technologies complement the company’s existing solutions to insulate copper wire used in motors and transformers and its coatings insulate sheets forming magnetic circuits of motors and transformers, computer elements, and other electrical devices to provide increased motor and power efficiency.
Transportation: Key provider of liquid and powder coatings for vehicle components, chassis, and agricultural, construction, and earth moving equipment, that protect against corrosion, provide increased durability, and deliver a superior appearance.
General Metal Finishing: Global provider of multiple technologies for a wide array of applications, including racking and shelving, metal furniture, appliances, protective coating, pipes and tubes, metal enclosures and fencing, industrial components, gutters, garage and entry doors, HVAC, metal wall panels, and power storage and electrical boxes.
Demand in this end-market is driven by a wide variety of macroeconomic factors, such as growth in GDP, new residential and commercial construction, as well as automotive and industrial production. There has also been an increase in demand for products that enhance environmental sustainability, corrosion resistance, productivity and color aesthetics, which the company provides through a combination of e-coat, waterborne, solventborne, ultraviolet (UV), and powder technologies. Customers select industrial coatings based on protection, durability, appearance, and value added through technical service and solutions, which can improve customers' application sustainability and productivity.
Performance Coatings Products and Brands
The company offers a comprehensive range of specially-formulated waterborne and solventborne products and systems used by the global automotive refinish industry to repair damaged vehicles. The company’s refinish products and systems comprise a range of coatings layers, as well as fillers, aerosols, and adhesives required to match the vehicle's color and appearance, producing a repair surface indistinguishable from the adjacent surface.
The company provides systems that enable body shops to match more than 220,000 color variations, using a database with more than four million formulations, in the global market. The company’s color technology is manifested in the pigment and dispersion technology that are utilized in its tints, one of the most technologically advanced parts of the refinish coatings system, which makes up most of its products in a body shop. The company has a large color library and several well-known, long-standing premium brands, including Cromax, Standox, Spies Hecker, Syrox, and Raptor, as well as other regional and local brands.
The company’s color matching and retrieval systems allow customers to quickly match any color, reducing the need for body shop technicians to repeat the color matching process, which saves time and materials. The color matching process begins with a technician scanning a damaged vehicle with one of the company’s advanced color matching tools, such as its Axalta Irus Scan hand-held spectrophotometer. The Axalta Irus Scan reads the vehicle color, evaluating both the unique flake and color characteristics of the specific vehicle. These characteristics may vary significantly, even for vehicles of the same make, model, and original color, due to a variety of factors, including a vehicle's age, plant at which it was assembled, weather conditions and operating history. The Axalta Irus Scan electronically connects with the company’s ColorNet database and generates for the body shop technician the precise mix of tints and colors needed to recreate that specific color for the part being repaired. In addition to the Axalta Irus Scan, the company offers customers several other color matching tools, including its VINdicator database, which identifies vehicle color based on its vehicle identification number, and traditional color matching fan decks.
The company has launched a completely hands-free mixing machine for its automotive refinish customers, Axalta Irus Mix. Axalta Irus Mix delivers highly accurate color and works with Axalta’s innovative packaging, designed to help refinish customers meet or exceed key business goals, including maximizing profitability and minimizing environmental impact.
The company has also launched a global customer experience platform for refinish customers, Axalta Nimbus. This technology seamlessly connects refinish customers to Axalta’s tools and resources to improve efficiency, enhance productivity, boost performance, and maximize profitability. With Axalta Nimbus, customers have everything they need to power the refinish process in a single platform, including color retrieval, product ordering, inventory management, training resources, and support. Axalta Nimbus is designed to be easy to use with an intuitive user interface for increased efficiency and customizable capabilities based on business need.
The company is also a leading global developer, manufacturer and supplier of functional and decorative liquid and powder coatings for a large number of diversified applications in the industrial end-market, including building materials, cabinet, wood, and luxury vinyl flooring and furniture markets in North America. The company’s liquid systems are used to provide insulation and thermo-mechanical protection for electrical conductors and devices, protect automotive parts and serve as primers, basecoats, and clearcoats for alloy and steel wheels, and provide weatherability and corrosion protection for metal building and infrastructure projects. Powder coatings products, both thermoset and thermoplastic, are an environmentally responsible, higher transfer efficiency alternative to liquid coatings. These coatings are typically electrostatically sprayed using a specialized spray gun and cured to create a uniform, high-quality finish. In the oil and gas industry, the company’s powder and liquid products are used to protect components from corrosion and severe conditions, such as extreme temperatures, pressures, and harsh chemicals.
The company’s major industrial brands include Imron Industrial, Tufcote Industrial, Corlar Industrial, Strenex Industrial, PercoTop, Voltatex, AquaEC, Durapon, Hydropon, UNRIVALED, and Ceranamel for liquid coatings and Alesta, Teodur, Nap-Gard, Abcite, and Plascoat for powder coatings.
Performance Coatings Sales, Marketing, and Distribution
The company leverages a large global refinish sales and technical support team to effectively serve its broad refinish customer base of approximately 93,000 body shops. Most of the company’s products are supplied by its network of approximately 5,000 independent local distributors. In select regions, including parts of Europe, it also sells directly to body-shop customers through company owned stores. These stores maintain an inventory of its products to fill orders from body shops in their market and assume credit risk and responsibility for logistics, delivery, and billing. In certain countries, the company utilizes importers that buy directly from the company and actively market its products to body shops. The company’s relationships with its top ten distributors are longstanding and continue to contribute to its success in the global refinish market.
The company’s large refinish sales force manages relationships directly with its end-customers to drive demand for its products, which in turn are purchased through customers in its distributor network. Due to the local nature of the refinish industry, the company’s sales force operates on a regional/country basis to provide clients with responsive customer service and local insight. As part of their coverage efforts, salespeople introduce new products to body shops and provide technical support and ongoing training. The company has 45 customer training centers established globally, which helps to deepen its customer relationships.
The company’s sales force also helps to drive shop productivity improvements and to install or upgrade body shop color matching and mixing equipment to improve shop profitability. Once a coating and color system is installed, a body shop almost exclusively uses its specific supplier's products. The proprietary nature of a coatings supplier's color systems, the substantial inventory needed to support a body shop, and the body shop's familiarity with an established brand lead to high levels of customer retention. The company’s customer retentions has been and continue to be strong.
The company’s large direct sales team in industrial serves its end customers, driving demand which is then primarily filled directly or through channels of distribution and e-commerce. It leverages this dedicated sales force and technical service team to provide regional support and identify global innovation projects to meet the evolving market needs. In the powder coatings segment, the company believes it is one of only three truly global producers that can satisfy the needs and specifications of a customer in multiple regions of the world, while maximizing productivity from the broad scale and scope of its operations.
Performance Coatings Customers
Within its Performance Coatings segment, the company sells coatings to customers in more than 140 countries. The company’s top ten customers accounted for approximately 20% of its Performance Coatings net sales during the year ended December 31, 2024.
In its industrial and refinish end-markets the company serves both large OEMs and a broad, fragmented local customer base. The company’s industrial end-market comprises a wide variety of industrial manufacturers, while its refinish end-market primarily comprises approximately 93,000 body shops, including:
Independent Body Shops: Single location body shops that utilize premium, mainstream or economy brands based on the local market.
Multi-Shop Operators (MSOs): Body shops with more than five locations focused on providing premium paint jobs with industry leading efficiency. MSOs use premium/mainstream coatings and state-of-the-art painting technology to increase shop productivity, allowing them to repair more vehicles faster.
OEM Dealership Body Shops: High-productivity body shops, located in OEM car dealerships, that operate like MSOs and provide premium services to customers using premium/mainstream coatings.
Performance Coatings Competition
The company’s primary competitors in the refinish end-market include AkzoNobel, BASF, PPG, and Sherwin Williams. Similarly, in the industrial end-market, the company competes against multi-national suppliers, such as AkzoNobel, PPG, and Sherwin-Williams, as well as a large number of local and regional players in the markets it serves.
Mobility Coatings segment
Through its Mobility Coatings segment, the company provides coatings technologies for light vehicle and commercial vehicle OEMs. These global customers are faced with evolving megatrends in electrification, sustainability, personalization, and autonomous driving that require a high level of technical expertise. The OEMs require efficient, environmentally responsible coatings systems that can be applied with a high degree of precision, consistency and speed. The end-markets within this segment are light vehicle and commercial vehicle.
The company’s solutions portfolio brings together the best of Axalta's experience and innovation into three categories: Core Mobility Solutions, Advanced Mobility Solutions, and Axalta Advantage.
Core Mobility Solutions comprises Axalta's best-in-class basecoats and clearcoats for color and beautification along with primers, electrocoats, and powder applications for surface protection.
Advanced Mobility Solutions encompasses products and applications for trends like sustainability, mass customization, two-tone and digital paint. It includes coatings with enhanced functionality that improve LiDAR and radar performance and exterior protection for electric vehicle platforms and components.
Axalta Advantage features expert services and consulting to improve productivity in and outside the paint shop, including application design, process improvement, cost and CO2 modeling, and troubleshooting.
Mobility Coatings End-Markets
Light Vehicle
Demand for light vehicle products is driven by regional light vehicle production. Light vehicle OEMs select coatings providers based on their global ability to deliver core and advanced technological solutions that improve exterior appearance and durability and provide long-term corrosion protection. These customers also look for suppliers that offer sustainable solutions to aid in the customer portfolio transformation and can enhance process efficiency, improve productivity and provide superior technical support. Rigorous environmental and durability testing, as well as obtaining engineering approvals are also key criteria used by global light vehicle OEMs when selecting coatings providers. Globally integrated suppliers are important because they offer products with consistent standards across regions and can deliver high-quality products in sufficient quantity while meeting OEM service requirements. The company’s global scale, people, expertise, innovative technology platforms, and customer focus position it to be a global partner and solutions provider to the most discerning and demanding light vehicle OEMs. The company is one of the few coatings producers that can provide OEMs with global product specifications, standardized color development, compatibility with the growing number of substrates, increasingly complex colors and environmentally-responsible coatings while continuing to simplify and reduce steps in the coating application process.
Commercial Vehicle
Sales in the commercial vehicle end-market are generated from a variety of applications, including HDT, MDT, bus and rail, motorcycles, marine and aviation, as well as related markets, such as trailers, recreational vehicles, and personal sport vehicles. This end-market is primarily driven by global commercial vehicle production, which is influenced by overall economic activity, government infrastructure spending, equipment replacement cycles and evolving environmental standards for sustainability.
Commercial vehicle OEMs select coatings providers on the basis of their ability to consistently deliver advanced technological solutions that improve exterior appearance, protection and durability and provide extensive color libraries and matching capabilities at the lowest total cost-in-use, while meeting stringent environmental requirements. Particularly for HDT applications, truck owners demand a significant variety of custom colors and advanced product technologies to enable custom designs. The company’s strong competitive position and growth are driven by its ability to provide customers with its brand, Imron, as well as leveraging its global product lines, regional knowledge, and customer service.
Mobility Coatings Products and Brands
The company develops and supplies a complete coatings product line for light vehicle OEMs. The company’s products are designed to enhance the styling and appearance of a vehicle's exterior while providing protection from the elements, extending the life of the vehicle. Widely recognized in the industry for the company’s advanced and patented technologies. The company’s light vehicle coatings portfolio is one of the broadest in the industry.
The coatings operation is a critical component of the light vehicle assembly process, requiring a high degree of precision, speed and productivity. The paint shop process typically includes a dip process, three application zones and three high-temperature ovens that cure each coating layer at temperatures ranging from 320°F to 400°F (i.e., high bake). The company’s key products consist of the four main coatings layers: electrocoat (AquaEC), primer (HyperDur), basecoat (ChromaDyne), and clearcoat (Lumeera).
The coatings process accounts for a majority of the total energy consumed during the light vehicle manufacturing process. With that in mind, the company has developed coatings technologies, including 3-Wet, Eco-Concept, and 2-Wet Monocoat that help its OEM customers lower costs by reducing energy consumption and increasing productivity.
The company continues to innovate with its OEM customers in driving this trend, as evidenced by use of its coatings on their flagship vehicle platforms. The company also develops and supplies a wide array of coatings systems for a broad range of commercial vehicle applications. These products simultaneously enhance aesthetic appearance and provide protection from the elements. The company meets the demands of commercial vehicle customers with its extensive offering of over 90,000 different colors. The company’s commercial vehicle brands include Imron, Imron Elite, Centari, Rival, Corlar epoxy undercoats, and AquaEC.
Mobility Coatings Sales, Marketing, and Distribution
The company has full-time technical representatives stationed at most of its light vehicle OEM customers' facilities around the world. These on-site representatives provide customer support, monitor the painting process, and track paint demand at each assembly plant. Monitoring OEM line performance in real-time is intended to allow the company’s technical support teams to help improve paint department operating efficiency and provide performance feedback to its formulating chemists and paint manufacturing teams. Many of the company’s customer technical support representatives also help OEMs manage their physical inventory by forecasting facility coatings demand based on the customer's build schedule.
The company sells and ships products directly to light vehicle OEMs in each of its four regions coordinated via a global point of contact for each customer and assist OEMs with on-site customer support. Located in 9 countries, its manufacturing facilities provide a local presence intended to cultivate strong relationships, gain intimate customer knowledge, provide superior technical support to its key customers and maintain just-in-time product delivery capabilities critical to OEMs.
In the commercial vehicle end-market, the company employs a dedicated sales and technical service team to support its diverse customer base, including a direct sales force supporting the HDT market. The company ships its coatings directly to commercial vehicle OEMs and may also provide on-site technical service representatives that play an important role by helping to optimize the painting process and by providing responsive customer support.
Mobility Coatings Customers
The company provides its products and services to light and commercial vehicle customers at over 220 assembly plants worldwide, including all the top ten global automotive manufacturers. The company has a stable customer base and is well positioned with the fastest growing OEMs in both the developed and emerging markets. The company’s top ten customers accounted for approximately 62% of its Mobility Coatings net sales during the year ended December 31, 2024.
Seasonality
Generally, the company’s first quarter net sales are less than other quarters primarily driven by its Performance Coatings segment as a result of the nature of repairs typically performed by its refinish end-market customers. In its North America and EMEA markets, the company typically sees more significant accidents from the inclement weather that require more time to repair and less repair throughput for its customers. The company’s Mobility Coatings segment does not experience significant net sales seasonality. Cash provided by operating activities has typically been greatest in the fourth quarter (year ended December 31, 2024) primarily driven by the timing of collections from its customers and payments to its vendors.
Patents, Licenses, and Trademarks
As of December 31, 2024, the company had a global portfolio of approximately 680 issued patents and more than 520 trademarks. The company actively applies for and obtain U.S. and foreign patents and trademarks on new products and process innovations and as of December 31, 2024, approximately 220 patent applications were pending throughout the world.
The company’s primary purpose in obtaining patents is to protect the results of its research for use in operations and licensing. The company owns or otherwise has rights to the trademarks, service marks, copyrights and trade names used in conjunction with the marketing and sale of its products and services. These trademarks include Abcite, Alesta, AquaEC, Audurra, Axalta Irus Mix, Axalta Irus Scan, Axalta NextJet, Axalta Nimbus, Centari, Ceranamel, Challenger, Chemophan, ColorNet, Corlar, Cromax, Cromax Mosaic, Durapon 70, Duxone, Harmonized Coating Technologies, Hydropon, Imron, Imron Elite, Imron ExcelPro, Lutophen, Nap-Gard, Nason, Raptor, Rival, Spies Hecker, Standox, StollaquidTM, Syntopal, Syrox, U-POL, Vermeera, and Voltatex, which are protected under applicable intellectual property laws.
Joint Ventures
As of December 31, 2024, the company was party to seven joint ventures, of which three were focused on the light vehicle end-market, two were focused in the refinish end-market, and two were focused in the industrial end-market. As of December 31, 2024, the company was the majority shareholder, and/or exercised control, in five joint ventures.
Regulatory Compliance
The company is subject to applicable federal, state, local and foreign laws and regulations relating to environmental protection and workers' safety, including those required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The company’s Environment, Health, Safety (EHS) and Sustainability policies and standards are a key element of the foundation upon which it develops, markets, manufactures, and distributes products and services to its global customers.
In addition, the company is, or may become, subject to various climate disclosure regimes regulating the disclosure of GHG emissions and related information, such as the European Union’s (EU) Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and Climate Related Financial Risk Act.
The company is also subject to and comply with increasingly complex privacy and data protection laws and regulations in the United States and other jurisdictions. This includes the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enforces rules relating to the protections around the processing and transfer of personal data.
History
Axalta Coating Systems Ltd., a Bermuda exempted company, was founded in 1866. The company was incorporated in 2012.
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