Exclusive: Rockwood pulls asset sale on low offers -sources

Rockwood Holdings Inc has canceled a combined auction of its titanium dioxide and performance additives units after failing to attract the offers it was hoping for, four people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The Princeton, New Jersey-based chemicals maker was in talks with private equity firms to sell the assets for between $1.5 billion and $2 billion but ended the process after it became apparent that such offers were not attainable, the people said.

Spinning off the assets instead is now an option that Rockwood is considering, one of the people said. All the people asked not to be identified because the talks were confidential. Rockwood declined to comment.

The canceled sale process comes less than a week after Rockwood agreed to sell one of its other businesses, industrial ceramics developer CeramTec, to European private equity firm Cinven Ltd for 1.49 billion euros ($1.98 billion).

(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis, Michael Erman and Soyoung Kim in New York; Editing by Gary Hill)