XPEL Completes Paintshield Acquisition

XPEL Technologies Corp. recently completed the acquisition of Paintshield Limited through a 100-percent share purchase. The United Kingdom-based company has served as an XPEL dealer and the design arm for its European pattern development activities. The deal cost XPEL $147,000 and 423,812 shares of common stock, but the company says it supports the its global product design and distribution activities.

With Paintshield comes joint venture interests in affiliates based in France, Italy, Greece (Balkens), Southeast Asia and Australia, where they will serve as distribution channels for XPEL’s product lines.

“Paintshield will have the prefix of XPEL and bring the XPEL brand to a global basis as XPEL Paintshield,” Steven J. McAuley, XPEL’s chief executive officer told Window Film in an exclusive interview. “The Paintshield brand is used in a number of other companies. All of those locations around the world utilize the Paintshield brand name and trademarks, so we will bring XPEL in front of all of that going forward.”

“This is the culmination of a joint approach that both companies envisioned some time ago,” says Tom Wakeford of Paintshield. “The untapped potential in the European and Asian markets necessitated the creation of a truly global operation, and this move puts us on the road to making our respective long-standing strategic and tactical objectives a reality.”

Paintshield is one of many acquisitions for XPEL recently. At press time, the company planned to acquire 100 percent of the stock of ArmourfendCAD Inc., a global paint protection pattern design house in El Dorado Hills, Calif., within a few weeks.

“We will keep the Armorfend brand going for now,” McAuley explains. “I’m not sure exactly, yet, how aggressively we’ll brand XPEL with that. We may place XPEL in front of it, or we may say ‘Armorfend, an XPEL Corp. company.’”

In January 2008, XPEL plans to complete the acquisition of Dublin, Ohio-based Performance Tools Distributing. The company also has indicated it intends to introduce a window film product in the near future and capitalize on the industry’s growth potential in foreign markets. For more exclusive information on these acquisitions and XPEL’s growth plans, see the Newsworthy section in Window Film’s November-December issue.

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