UPDATE, 1/15/2013, 11:40 a.m. EST: The names of Bredin Prat lawyers working on the deal have been added to the article’s last paragraph.

Glass and metal packaging company Ardagh Group said Monday it has agreed to pay $1.7 billion to acquire the U.S. bottle and jar unit of France’s Compagnie de Saint-Gobain.

Saint-Gobain is selling Muncie, Indiana–based Verallia North America‚ the country’s second-largest manufacturer of glass containers behind Owens-Illinois Inc. The business’s 13 facilities in the United States make roughly 9 billion containers a year, which are used mainly by the wine, food, and beverage industries.

The deal gives Luxembourg-based Ardagh an opportunity to expand its operations overseas, with company chairman Paul Coulson saying in a statement that Ardagh expects to get 40 percent of its total sales from the U.S. in the future as a result of the acquisition. Saint-Gobain, meanwhile, is turning away from the packaging industry to focus on what it considers its core businesses, including home construction products and glass products used in the automobile and construction industries, according to Bloomberg. The company backed off of a planned initial public offering of the Verallia unit two years ago that sought to raise $1.5 billion.

Ardagh is being advised on the purchase by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, with Shearman & Sterling providing antitrust and financing advice. A Freshfields spokesman could not immediately provide information about the firm’s deal team.

Shearman’s team is led by European corporate partner Apostolos Gkoutzinis in London and New York–based antitrust partner Wayne Dale Collins. Shearman’s past work for Ardagh includes advising on its $2.27 billion purchase of Impress Coöperative, the holding company for metal packaging manufacturer Impress Group, in 2010. In August the firm represented Ardagh in its $880 million acquisition of Anchor Glass Container Company.

For its part, Saint-Gobain has turned to French firm Bredin Prat and Cravath, Swaine & Moore as counsel on the sale. The company enlisted the help of the two firms in 2011, when it was planning the aborted Verallia IPO.

Cravath’s team on the deal includes antitrust partner Christine Varney, corporate partner George Stephanakis, and tax partner Stephen Gordon.