Co-owners,

We've spun the wheel for the Europe bucket. The ticker has landed in Amsterdam, on a company whose products you have almost certainly touched today without once thinking about who made them.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns since inception in 1986 as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Paint-making heritage dating to 1792. Headquartered in Amsterdam. Listed on Euronext Amsterdam (AKZA).

In 2025, a brand-new Boeing 787 Dreamliner rolled out of the paint shop for Alaska Airlines wearing an aurora borealis down its side. Greens and violets rippling along the fuselage, eleven separate colours blended to look like the northern sky. Every one of them came from a single supplier.

Now look away from the plane. The walls of the room you're sitting in. The car parked outside. The bridge you drove over this morning, and the ship that carried half the things in your home across an ocean. There's a good chance the same company coated all of them.

You've probably never heard its name. It's AkzoNobel, and its own description of itself is hard to improve on: chances are you are only ever a few metres away from one of its products.

A few key facts:

We'll come back to why a business this essential has been such a frustrating thing to own.

The paint side of the story starts in 1792, when a house painter named Wiert Willem Sikkens began mixing his own varnishes in the Dutch city of Groningen. The other half of the name is more surprising. Nobel is that Nobel: the company's Swedish lineage runs back to the chemical and explosives empire of Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite and left his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes. In 1994 the Dutch and Swedish sides merged, and AkzoNobel was born. The varnish and the dynamite money ended up under one roof.

Two of its most famous brands were bought in, not built. Dulux, the paint on millions of living-room walls, arrived in 2008 with the takeover of Britain's ICI. International, the marine coating we'll come to, came a decade earlier with the purchase of Courtaulds. Then in 2018 the company did something bolder: it sold off its entire chemicals division to become a pure paints and coatings business. If that instinct for shedding everything that isn't core sounds familiar, it's the same move we watched DCC make in an earlier edition, selling healthcare and technology to become a focused energy company.

Half the business is the paint you'd recognise. Dulux, Sikkens, Cuprinol on the garden fence, Hammerite on the railings. Interior and exterior paint for homes and professional decorators, sold in more than 150 countries. It's the steadier, higher-margin half, and quietly it held up better last year than the flashier side did.

The other half is where it gets interesting, because most of it is invisible: the industrial coatings business. One product line captures the whole idea.

Somewhere out on the ocean right now, a container ship is pushing through the water carrying next week's deliveries. Below the waterline, the sea is trying to colonise it. Barnacles, algae and weed want to fasten onto the steel, and left alone they'd wrap the hull in a rough, heavy crust. A heavily fouled hull can burn as much as 40% more fuel to hold the same speed. The coating that keeps it smooth carries the brand name International, one of the biggest names in marine paint. The same business fireproofs oil rigs, coats the red porticoes of the São Paulo Museum of Art in a bespoke shade they mixed called MASP Red, and protects the bridges and storage tanks most of us never look at twice.

Then there's the powder that's baked onto your radiator and your car's alloy wheels, the refinish paint a body shop sprays after someone scrapes your bumper, and the coatings on aircraft, drink cans and the back of your phone. If it needs to be coloured or protected, AkzoNobel probably has a product for it.

The protection here comes from something softer than a patent or a factory: trust, built slowly. Once a shipyard, an aircraft maker or a chain of body shops has certified and trained its people on your coating system, swapping to a rival is a genuine hassle few bother with. The recipes take decades to perfect and the customer relationships longer.

So here's a genuinely excellent business. And here's the number that stops you: a company selling more than €10 billion of paint a year is worth, on the stock market, about €10 billion. The shares are close to where they stood a decade ago, and roughly half their 2021 peak. The dividend has sat unchanged at €1.98 a share for four years running, even as the company steadily lifted its profits. Not every quiet, essential business in your index has been a great investment. This one has been a frustrating one.

Management has spent three years cutting costs and sharpening the business, and its profit margins have climbed. But the bigger move came in November 2025. AkzoNobel agreed to merge with Axalta, an American coatings company, in a deal that would create a roughly $17 billion global giant aiming for far higher profitability than either manages alone.

There's a neat irony in it. Back in 2017, AkzoNobel fought off a hostile takeover approach from America's PPG and stayed independent. Eight years later it's choosing a merger with a different American rival, this time on its own terms. Shareholders vote on 5 August 2026, and the plan is to list the combined company in New York.

The risks are real and worth naming. A lawsuit in Australia over a coating used on a gas project a decade ago has a claimant seeking around €2.7 billion, more than a quarter of the whole company's value, though AkzoNobel denies liability and is insured up to €500 million. A recent jump in oil prices is pushing up the cost of raw materials, which the company is racing to pass on through higher prices. Demand across construction and industry has been soft. And a cross-border merger this size has to clear regulators in around thirty countries before it can close.

Most weeks we show you a quiet business that turned out to be a wonderful investment. This week is the honest counterpoint. AkzoNobel is a genuinely world-class company, its coatings on your walls and your car and the hull of a ship you'll never see, and it has still been a middling thing to own for a decade. The index holds companies like this too. The open question, the one that a shareholder vote in August starts to answer, is whether a great business is finally about to become a great investment. Either way, if you hold a European or global index fund, a small slice of nearly everything that's been painted or protected around you is already yours.

Data and images sourced from AkzoNobel Annual Report 2025 and AkzoNobel Q1 2026 Investor Update. Share price and market cap as of mid July 2026.

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Next week, we'll be looking at a company from Developed Asia-Pacific.