FinanceDublin.com - <b>Deals of the Year 2025: </b>Smurfit Westrock merger creates world’s largest paper and packaging company

In the space of less than 90 years Jefferson Smurfit has come a very long way. From its humble beginnings in a packaging plant in Rathmines in the late 1930s, to its flotation on the Irish Stock Exchange in 1964, becoming the first billion pound market value Irish company, the management buyout in 2002, the merger with Kappa in 2005, the IPO in 2007 of the merged Smurfit Kappa, culminating finally with the historic $25bn merger last year with the American group WestRock to create a global packaging giant.

Merging two companies to create the largest paper and packaging company in the world with combined revenues of $34bn and over 100,000 employees in 40 countries was a complex task and the game changing merger of Smurfit Kappa and WestRock is the Finance Dublin M&A Deal of the Year. Under the terms of the deal, Smurfit Kappa shareholders owned 50.4% and WestRock shareholders 49.6% of the merged entity.

The transaction involved both a merger and a change of the princ....

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