German specialty chemicals company Lanxess has retained naming rights for the Lanxess Arena, a multi-purpose venue in its home city of Cologne.
The new five-year deal will become effective on January 1, 2019 and run until the end of 2023.
The 20,000-seat Lanxess Arena is used to stage handball, basketball and ice hockey games, and the venue also stages music concerts on a regular basis.
The arena holds hosting rights to the European Handball Federation’s (EHF) Final4 event, which serves as the season finale of the Champions League club competition, until 2020.
Lanxess began sponsoring the arena in 2008. Hitherto the venue had been known as the Kölnarena.
Stefan Holzner, director of Arena Management, which operates the venue, said: “Since the 2008 agreement, the Lanxess Arena has had an unprecedented success story. In recent years, we have been able to steadily increase our capacity utilisation and are now firmly established among the world's most successful multi-functional centres. Such a positive result would be inconceivable without Lanxess.”