A $725 million deal is dead. On August 14, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission won a permanent injunction blocking Henkel AG & Co. KGaA from buying A-Paint Topco, Inc., the maker of Liquid Nails construction adhesive. The court’s written opinion is still under seal.
The FTC filed its complaint on December 15, 2025, in the Southern District of New York. It argued that the deal would join “the two biggest brands, by far, of construction adhesives sold domestically” at stores such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menards and Ace Hardware. Rival manufacturers, the agency said, have struggled to win lasting shelf space at those retailers.
The FTC’s case rested on a narrow market: construction adhesives sold through retail, meaning home centers and hardware stores. It left out distributors, which it conceded carry a wider range of brands but mostly serve professionals buying in larger volumes. The agency said the merger would make an already concentrated market tighter and end the “intense head-to-head competition” that gives do-it-yourselfers and tradespeople lower prices, better quality and new products.
Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, responded to the ruling with a shot at the deal’s logic. “Anyone who looked at the construction adhesives shelves of a hardware store or home improvement retailer could see that a merger between Loctite and Liquid Nails would be a bad deal for Americans,” he said. He added that the acquisition “threatened to drive up the cost of a critical product for building and maintaining homes across the United States.”
A New Way to Sue
The case is also the first win for a changed FTC approach. Historically the agency filed in its own administrative court, known as Part 3, and then asked a federal judge for a preliminary injunction. Henkel was challenged only in federal court, where the FTC sought a permanent injunction, as the Justice Department does.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson announced the shift shortly after the complaint. “I think there’s a lot more credibility in the agency’s enforcement when the final determiner of whether the law has been violated is not the person making the accusation,” he said. He also suggested the approach could reduce the risk of constitutional challenges to the agency’s internal adjudication system.
The reasoning behind the injunction will not be public until the court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law come out from under seal.
