All the world's cultures and religions and languages are filled to the brim with images and stories of water. In the developed countries, clean drinking water is so easy to obtain and so cheap to use that we never give it a thought. Even in the desert, we can turn a tap and water flows freely into our glasses, fills our tubs and swimming pools, and waters our lawns and gardens and golf courses.

Fishman worries that this seeming abundance of water, and our resulting blindness to pricing and deploying water more efficiently, will likely lead to catastrophic water shortages.

Around the World of Water
Fishman seeks to cure our ignorance of water with a lengthy review of water facts and science, and a globe-hopping tour of water and how we use and misuse it in industrial, agricultural, commercial and residential applications.

In a visit to IBM's huge chip-making plant in Burlington, Vermont, we learn of the huge amount of super-pure water they must produce to create their computer chips. We see how they have learned over time to think of water as resource that can be managed much more efficiently, significantly reducing both water and energy costs. But even with all their savings this one IBM plant still uses 3.2 million gallons of water a day.

Industry and agriculture are prodigious users of water:

• Fishman notes one ton of steel takes 300 tons of water
• 49 percent of water use in the US is for power plants
• It takes 250 gallons of water per person per day to generate enough electricity for a single home
• It takes five liters of water to produce a two-liter bottle of coke
• In water-short Australia, a single wool processing factory uses 380,000 gallons of water daily
• Also in Australia, a single farmer needs 6 billion liters of water to grow rice on his 10,450 acres

The good news about water is that it is never destroyed or used up. Fishman writes that we're drinking the same water today that the dinosaurs drank. The challenge is to use water efficiently, and to find affordable ways to make it available where it is most needed. Fishman appears to favor greater use of market pricing so that everyone has an incentive to use water effectively. He cites examples, such as the IBM plant in Vermont, where industry has been a leader in developing technology and procedures that help us use water more efficiently.

"Except for air and water," he notes, "…we pay for almost everything else in life that is essential; we entrust everything, from electricity to hospitals, to private companies." But Fishman worries a few pages later that "…it's also vital not to let business get so far ahead that we cede the future of water to commercial interests."

Despite his concerns about how far to trust business, Fishman seems most optimistic about industry's ability to create technical solutions that can maintain our lifeline to water. "Technology is making it easier to solve almost any water problem," he writes. He sees the real problem will be getting people and political leaders to recognize the problems, and understand and accept the technical solutions before it's too late.

As Fishman points out, "…running out of water is like slipping off the edge of a cliff—it's hard to be saved." Fishman wants us to save our water supplies before it's too late for the whole of civilization to be rescued.

- The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman is published by Free Press (400 pages). I bought it as a Kindle eBook on Amazon for $12.99.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

According to a 150-page study released by Standard Chartered Bank (PDF, 4.78 MB), the world is in "a sustained period of high economic growth, or super-cycle" that started in 2000 and is expected to last for another 20 years or more. Despite two global recessions (2001–2002 and 2008–2009), the report shows global output increased more than 50 percent in the last decade. By 2030 Standard Charter predicts the global economy will reach $300 trillion, up from $62 trillion today.

The report defines a super-cycle as a period of exceptionally high global growth, "lasting a generation or more, driven by increasing trade, high rates of investment, urbanization and technological innovation and characterized by the emergence of large, new economies, first seen in high catch-up growth rates across the emerging world." The report points to two previous super-cycles: from 1870 to 1913 and from the end of the Second World War to the oil crisis of 1973.

This new, 21st century super-cycle is expected to last until at least 2030.It is being propelled by emerging markets such as India, China, Indonesia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. "Hundreds of millions of people are likely to enter the global workforce," the study reports, "driving urbanization, high rates of investment and technological innovation. While earlier super-cycles were driven by the comparatively small populations in the West, the current super-cycle will involve 85 per cent of the world population."

Asia in particular is expected to see sustained and dramatic growth. The study forecasts that living standards, measured by real per capita income, will have increased nine-fold in China and India between 2000 and 2030. "Rising personal incomes will push billions of people into the middle classes and drive consumption which will spur domestic economic growth," according to the study. China is predicted to be the largest global economy by 2030, passing the United States. India is expected to be the third largest economy.

Standard Chartered was formed in 1969 through a merger of the Standard Bank of British South Africa, founded in 1863, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, founded in 1853. The bank reports that 90 per cent of its income and profits come from operations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The Short Term Economic News
March was indeed a good month for economic news around the world, with capital equipment sales strong across the globe.  U.S. government reports for March showed a continued upward trend in the economy and unemployment continued downward, though still high compared to pre-recession levels.

In March the Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association (CEMA) reported that 2010 shipments in North America were up 9.6%. CEMA estimates that shipments totaled $6.642 billion for 2010, an increase of $584 million from 2009 shipments of $6.058 billion. New orders were estimated to total $6.85 billion in 2010, up $1.14 billion over 2009, an increase of 19.96%.

Process Equipment Sales in the Short and Long Term
Economists have long considered industrial equipment sales to be a lagging indicator of the business cycle: the equipment business can remain strong for many months after a recession starts and remain in the dumps long after the larger economy has recovered. When it comes to longer-cycle trends, however, we might expect to see equipment sales—especially process equipment—to be a leader in sustaining a super-cycle. It will take a significant increase in material processing capacity to create a $300 trillion world economy by 2030.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

This story provides an important lesson beyond how these student-engineers found personal fulfillment in "making the world a better place." There is a larger story of how organizations are now able to focus on small, "local tech" projects as the way to get things done.
EWB-USA currently has more than 350 active projects in 45 developing countries around the world including water, renewable energy, sanitation and construction projects, such as a bridge across a mountain river.  These projects are completed in partnership with local communities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). All chapters work with communities for a minimum of five years: 

"EWB-USA's unique grassroots approach requires that all program proposals come directly from the communities themselves.  This increases the likelihood of success by ensuring that the needs addressed by our chapters are being identified and driven by the community.  Every program begins with an assessment trip where the chapter performs a community needs assessment and works with the community to identify their priorities.  During the following years the chapter returns to perform further assessment, implementation, training, and monitoring and evaluation trips.  Throughout the program community members receive training on the maintenance and operation of their infrastructure and a financial mechanism is established to ensure long term economic sustainability." 

You could think of EWB's approach to these small-scale infrastructure projects as "long tail engineering," following the online marketing pattern Chris Anderson described in an October 2004 Wired Magazine article and later in a book published in 2006. With its ability to share information instantly and at very low cost, the Internet has tipped the value proposition of engineered projects from mass solutions, brought to us via mass production and mass communication.

Now organizations can fund lower cost, local solutions, with easy to produce custom solutions that rely on targeted, very local communication. To get the benefits of economies of scale, mass solutions required large-scale, one-size-fits-all projects.

Today, the Internet makes it possible to share engineering expertise cost-effectively for customized, very small, truly localized projects.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

It took two decades for the 20th century to get up to full steam, and for the "roaring 20s" to launch a new age.  Known as the Jazz Age, the twenties set the stage for the technology-driven culmination of what historians call the Modern Age, an era of science and technology that started approximately with Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in 1436 and extended beyond the Postmodern 1950s and 60s, to include the Atomic Age, the Space Age, and the dawn of the Internet Age.

But since we're in the Internet Age, and things happen faster in Internet time, the 21st century's Next Age, whatever we call it, is likely to arrive sooner than expected. Here are just a few of the signs that the Next Age is here:

Moore's Law continues driving computing costs down, and that's driving everything smaller, lighter, faster, smarter and networked. Computers have gone from mainframe to mini to micro/PC to mobile. At Monaco Media Forum, Ericson CEO predicted 50 billion connected devices by 2020 and a truly "networked society." (See MMF 2010 Keynote on YouTube, "Internet 2.0: Mobile changes everything," by Hans Vestberg, President & CEO, Ericsson).

But it's not just people getting connected by the Internet. Where the numbers get really big--and really interesting to those of us in the industrial equipment business--is what has been called the Internet of Things. "The next big revolution that will happen is the Internet of things," Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padma Warrior said at the 2010 CTIA Wireless Trade Show in Las Vegas. She predicted 1 trillion connected devices by 2013.

Networked things in a process include sensors, which can monitor and report process status, actuators, which can trigger an action, and controllers. Actions based on an input from a sensor are turned into a command by a controller. An example from my world of process equipment would be a Smart Force Transducer (made smart by an on-board microprocessor) that sends a digital weight signal to a feeder controller (also dependent on a microprocessor), that controls the speed of a motor (the actuator) that turns the screws of a loss-in-weight feeder.

According to K-Tron CTO Jim Foley, one of the biggest gains yet to be realized by the Network of Things in the process industries will be in terms of feeder system support. "A big trend in industrial networking," Foley said, "has been the near-universal acceptance of Ethernet ." He said all the industrial network protocols are now able to run on top of Ethernet, which is very easy to connect to either within the factory or remotely. This offers the possibility of instant remote diagnostics and troubleshooting.

"We have the tools now," Foley said, "to provide remote support, and the advantages to our customers are obviously huge. The only thing missing is for processors to put in place the safeguards they feel necessary to grant our service people the access."

The Internet Age doesn't simply grow at an astounding pace: It keeps changing and morphing in entirely unpredicted ways. Its impact spreads from how we market and sell our products to how we service our customers. It transforms our society, our children, our employees and our customers.

When social media hit the Internet scene in the last decade, it so changed the landscape we gave it its own name, Web 2.0. Now, smart phones and their apps, followed closely by tablets and e-books, have once again transformed the Internet landscape. Today's Internet is more social than ever, highly search-driven, far more local in language and culture, and is moving far beyond the desktop. What does all this mean to industry?

In an article on CIO.com titled "The Internet of Things and the Cloud CIO of the Future," Bernard Golden, author of the best-selling "Virtualization for Dummies," wrote:

"The simple fact is that everyone — and that includes (perhaps especially includes) those of us in the technology industry — underestimates the growth of ever-cheaper computing devices. To quote one industry luminary, later hoisted on his own petard, Ken Olsen, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Olsen now is laughed at for such an attitude, but the fact is, for the reality of the market as he saw it at the time, it was completely appropriate. But he completely missed how the market exploded once the reduced cost of personal computing enabled entire new uses for computers…. Ken Olsen's example indicates that one is better served in keeping one's eyes on the horizon rather than the well-trod ground at one's feet."

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Illustration: Where there's smoke there's fire by Russell Patterson

The business world's road warriors have led the charge. On every flight I take I see an increasing number of iPads as I walk down the aisle towards my seat. Before the flight they're checking last minute email, or getting the latest news. During the flight, they're watching a movie, reviewing a document or working on a presentation. You could do all these things with a notebook computer or a smart phone, but the iPad makes it so much easier and far more fun.

In September I talked with a lady at the Cincinnati airport, one of a half dozen or so using iPads as we waited for our flight. She's a corporate trainer, mostly working with small groups. With the iPad she can leave the PC and projector home, reducing both the weight and complexity of the equipment she must carry. Her company wasn't ready to spring for this new technology; so her husband bought her one for her birthday.

The iPad is one of those unique gifts that fits everyone of every age. I know a physician who is giving iPads to all five of his children, who range in age from 8 to 18. I'm giving one to my wife for Christmas, and I know several other men whose wives are getting the same. On Thanksgiving Day, my four-year-old grandson walked in the door playing "Angry Birds" on his mother's iPad.

It all started with the iPod, and with each new addition to its cool iTools, Apple has created what Seth Godin might call an iTribe. In his classic little book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Godin describes how today's successful organizations have leaders, not managers. Managers are cynics. Leaders have hope and infect their followers with hope. And magic. Every Apple iProduct has been filled with magic. The first time people hold the bright iPad screen in their hands, they say "Wow!"

That's why, like so many others, I put the iPad at the top of my gift giving list this year. It's magic.

I was at the Deloitte event with Bob Wisniewski who was accepting an award for K-Tron International. For the second year running K-Tron has been named to Deloitte's annual list of the fastest growing technology, life sciences and clean technology companies in the region. Though his presentation was cut short, Hagel's message resonated loudly for those who were present.

Hagel said it's not development of major new products or services (the first path) that's going to drive growth in the future. While innovation remains important and is a good starting point for growth, good ideas are quickly copied  and improved upon and don't remain a competitive advantage for long. Major acquisitions (the second path) present their own challenges, and the business landscape is littered with big acquisions gone wrong.

The third path is what Hagel calls "leveraged growth," and he's quick to add that doesn't mean financial leverage. It's leveraging your company's capability to add more value for your customers. The path to more customer value, he says, lies in your company's talent development. This secret to future growth is at the heart of a major new book Hagel has written with John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (link to buy book on Amazon.com). 

You can learn more about Hagel's books and his ideas on his website, Edge Perspectives. If you sign up for the authors' newsletter, you can instantly download six e-booklets :

• Pursuing Passion
• Shaping Serendipity
• Talent: The Dilbert Paradox
• From Passion to Potential
• Three Levels of Pull
• Passion versus Obsession

I have not yet read the book but I did download and read the six booklets. In Booklet Three, Talent: The Dilbert Paradox, you can learn more about the authors' view on talent development:

"Putting talent development center stage… forces a reassessment of business strategy, particularly growth strategies. Companies that aren't growing rapidly often fail to provide a rich set of opportunities for their employees to develop. This occurs because slower-growing companies confront fewer new performance requirements and generally offer slower advancement opportunities than faster-growing ones. Slow growth companies are thus at a disadvantage in developing the talent of their employees. Over time, they will likely find it harder to attract and retain world-class talent.

"Consider Google's ability to attract top quality talent from slower growing technology companies. And notice how even Google has more recently been losing its own talent to still-faster growing companies like Facebook….

"At another level, the broad-based shift in many markets from product-based to service-based businesses also informs how well and how fast companies develop talent. Services typically offer the opportunity for richer and quicker market feedback loops and more rapid iterations on the design of customer offers than products do. As a result, companies with a higher percentage of services relative to product businesses will have a talent advantage."

Is your company taking the "third path" to growth? Do you work to develop your company's talent advantage? Are your equipment and systems suppliers adding value through their development and application of talented associates devoted to solving your process problems?

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Teachers from third through fifth grades came to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, NJ to learn how to become better teachers of math and science. About 2,600 teachers have attended the academy since 2005. Golfer Phil Mickelson is more than a celebrity name behind the project. According to McGurn, Mickelson has had a lifelong passion for math and science and even uses his understanding of vectors and probabilities to the advantage of his golf game.

McGurn has this to say about the future value of the academy:

Though there are few metrics about results, some outside research suggests that the training they receive is leading to increased use and frequency of math and science in the classrooms of academy alumni. Mr. Mickelson says it's a 15- to 20-year bet.

"It's hard to teach a subject when you don't feel good about it or lack confidence," [Mickelson] says. "We bring teachers on an all-expenses-paid trip… give them good instructors… treat them like professionals… by getting them excited about teaching science, we'll have more American kids excited about studying math and science."

Though 21 years have passed since the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil in Alaska, it is safe to assume that this event is known far more widely than these math and science sessions. But consider the cumulative effect of 2,600 grade school teachers changing the life direction of countless students. Consider the children who have (and will in the future) become excited about math and science because a teacher attended this program. Consider what it means to our communities and our companies when our youth become proficient in math and science, even if they never pursue a career as an engineer or scientist.

The Mickelson academy for grade school teachers is one of eight math and science programs listed on the ExxonMobil website. In terms of public good, which do you think will pay the greater reward? BP's declaration of green energy or ExxonMobil's energizing commitment to making math and science accessible to more children?

I'm guessing technology knowledge is the bigger issue for companies in the long run. People who don't understand what you do, or how you do it, can't appreciate the extraordinary efforts you take to make the stuff they consume.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

As BP demonstrated, smiley-face PR doesn't work in the long run. They are reported to have spent $200 million just in the first two years of their "Beyond Petroleum" campaign launched in 2000. Their new green logo, together with a concerted advertising and PR campaign, was aimed at transforming their public persona from oil producer (British Petroleum) to lovable provider of green energy.

The campaign won awards from the advertising industry, but even before their infamous oil slick, the company wasn't buying much love in certain sectors. Long before the mega-spill they were mocked by the public chorus for "greenwashing." A January 14, 2008 Ad Age article (BP: Coloring Public Opinion?) noted, "The ongoing campaign raises the question of whether advertising -- as much as action -- can change public perception of a corporation like BP, which is engaged in the often dirty business of finding and producing energy."

Post-spill, the BP name (and logo) have lost whatever green sheen their $200 million down payment might have bought them. Maybe in the long run BP did industry leaders a favor in teaching that industries, like people, can't buy love.

In BP's "Beyond Petroleum" Branding Strategy Became an Epic Failure (June 2, 2010) Jim Gregory wrote, "Branding is all about creating alignment of your company's business processes with its corporate culture. British Petroleum (BP) provides a case in point of a brand that got way out front of its business process and culture to produce tremendous exposure to risk."

Gregory is founder and CEO of CoreBrand, a global brand strategy and communications firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.  The risk he cites might be termed the risk of the inauthentic brand. Bloggers warned long ago that you have to be committed to establishing an authentic voice in your online communication. For corporations that commitment needs to be backed by an authentic brand. As Gregory concludes, "Understanding one's brand in relation to its business and culture is critical for allocating budgets properly. More importantly, it should be a way of life for the management of any corporation."

How do you think industry can best portray itself in an environment ranging from indifferent to uninformed to hostile when it comes to anything industrial? If your company or industry has a success story to tell, send an email to don@porwderandbulk.com. We'll share your story here.

--About the art: the artistic take on the BP logo is by "mconner74" and is one of 1,231 entries submitted to a logo contest on LogoMyWay.com.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

This wealth of practical knowledge and know-how is freely shared in white papers that can be found on corporate websites and cited in blogs and help forums. Following are a few of the white papers that have come across my web browser most recently.

Application Example: Feeding & Conveying in Polyolefin Production
This 12 page document by the K-Tron Process Group may be the most comprehensive white paper they've yet published, which is saying a lot considering the 28 other white papers available for download, covering food, pharmaceutical, chemical and the plastics industries. The carefully illustrated paper proves a complete review of the many processes available today in producing the most important polymer resins used in the world today. You can download Feeding & Conveying in Polyolefin Production here. Registration is free and gives you access to all the other white papers, spec sheets and brochures on the site. While you're there on the Polyolefin Production page, you'll also see a cool fly-through animation of feeding and conveying in the dry-end of the polyolefin process.

BlueLevel Technologies: Level Measurement and Monitoring White Papers
BlueLevel Technologies currently offers 11 white papers on their website covering a variety of topics and issues related to level measurement and monitoring.  Topics include overviews of products and technologies available for powder and bulk solids applications, industry-specific applications, and safety issues. BlueLevel Technologies' Managing Director Joe Lewis was an early advocate of publishing white papers that document a company's expertise on a particular subject and serve as educational tools. See his White Papers Are Great Tools For Assessing Vendor Expertise article that he wrote for this blog in 2005.

Hosokawa Micron Powder Systems: Powder Processing Educational Center
The Hosokawa Micron Powder Systems website provides an Educational Center where you'll find 12 technical articles on a variety of powder processing topics: 

• Advances in Powder Micronization Technology for the Pharmaceutical Industry
• Advances in Powder Processing Technologies for Chemical, Food and Mineral Applications
• Combustion Research Center Quits Milling Around, Starts Milling On-Site
• Dry Agglomeration Technology Using Bepex Roller Co
• Fluidized Bed Jet Milling for Economical Powder Processing
• Stirred Freeze Drying – 3 pages
• Homing in On the Best Size Reduction Method
• Innovative Milling & Micronization Techniques For the Pharmaceutical Industry
• Sizing Up Grinding Mills
• The Future of Freeze Drying
• Toner Tests Mill, Mix, and Classify Ingredients
• Increasing SOx removal efficiencies in Dry Sorbent Injection Systems

The white papers are PDFs and free to download. In The Future of Freeze Drying you'll find a brief history of the process, which is said to go back to the ancient Incas, who preserved food by freezing it in the winter mountains. At those high altitudes the frozen water is removed through the low vapor pressure of the water in the surrounding air. Although the process was slow,
the quality of the food remained remarkably good over time.

Malvern Instruments: Online Knowledge Base
Malvern Instruments makes you register before you can even see what they offer in their Applications Library, but if you take the time you'll be rewarded with 769 white papers. The Malvern website also offers on-demand multimedia presentations, podcasts, e-learning opportunities, user training and web seminars. In addition to English, some content is available in other languages such as German, Italian and Portuguese. You can preview one of Malvern's white papers before you take the trouble to register on their website. Go to 10 ways to Control Rheology by changing Particle Properties right here on the News Center.

A Standard by which Companies Are Judged
In a recent news release, Joe Lewis cites a 1922 white paper by Winston Churchill as the first instance of a white paper. Another source points to lengthy 19th century Blue Papers published by the British government and presented to Parliament wrapped in a blue cover. Shorter position papers were published with white rather than blue covers. Soon the name white paper became associated with any brief, well-focused background report. Americans adopted the term during World War II to apply to government and business reports.

But it wasn't until the 1990s and the growth of the Internet that white papers came to play an increasingly important role in business. For today's engineers white papers have become one of the most fruitful places to find practical process knowledge. And for those selling to process engineers, well written white papers are now a standard by which companies are judged to be serious players in the industry.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator

Joe said in his experience in past recessions he had seen weaker companies unable to weather the downturn get bought out by stronger companies at the bottom of the recession. On the other hand, I would hazard to guess that when you see market leaders with strong balance sheets for sale, it likely means the market is headed up. Otherwise the purchaser would not likely pay the premium such an acquisition requires.

In the following of 2010 acquisitions found on this site, you can find examples of both types of acquisitions, but there appears to be more quality companies, rather than distressed properties in the mix:

Malvern Acquires Assets of Reologica Instruments AB: The UK's Malvern Instruments Limited acquired assets of Swedish rheology company Reologica Instruments AB (Lund, Sweden), which went into "administration" on March 23, 2010. Paul Walker, Managing Director of Malvern Instruments, said, "This purchase gives Malvern access to additional technologies and intellectual property that will support the continued development of our own rheology business.”

Nederman acquires Dantherm Filtration: Sweden's Nederman Holding AB announced it has "doubled its business to become the global market leader in industrial air filtration.” Nederman acquired Dantherm Filtration, "one of the leading manufacturers of industrial air filtration equipment. Dantherm Filtration (excluding the business not taken over in France) had sales in 2009 of around SEK 980 million, a headcount of slightly over 900 and is a business area of the listed Danish Group, Dantherm A/S. The acquisition of Dantherm Filtration is in line with Nederman's strategy of acquiring businesses that complement existing products and systems in customer-focused areas. The acquisition is also in line with Nederman's strategy of expanding its customer base and their customer areas. The acquisition also continues Nederman's strategy of expanding in the value chain by selling systems and an increasing amount of aftermarket sales.”

Outotec acquires Ausmelt Ltd.: Finland's Outotec has completed acquisition of Australian listed company Ausmelt Ltd. In the transaction Ausmelt was valued at approximately AUD 50 million (EUR 31 million). "One of Outotec's strategic growth initiatives is acquisition of complementary technologies. Ausmelt has an excellent strategic fit with Outotec. This acquisition complements our technology portfolio in environmentally sound smelting technologies, and allows us to offer smaller scale copper and nickel smelters as well as solutions for ferrous metals, zinc, lead and tin concentrates, zinc bearing residues, recycling and various secondary and waste materials. We believe that within Outotec there are significant growth opportunities for the Ausmelt business," says Pertti Korhonen, President and CEO of Outotec.

Bemis acquires Alcan Packaging Food Americas: Bemis Company, Inc., a global supplier of flexible packaging and pressure sensitive label materials headquartered in Neenah, Wisconsin, announced acquisition of the Food Americas operations of Alcan Packaging, a business unit of international mining group Rio Tinto plc. Bemis has  sales of over $3.5 billion

Atlas Copco acquires Quincy Compressor: Sweden's Atlas Copco completed the acquisition of Quincy Compressor from EnPro Industries, with the exception of Quincy's Chinese operations, where regulatory approvals from local authorities are still pending. Quincy Compressor designs and manufactures reciprocating compressors, rotary screw compressors and vacuum pumps, primarily under the Quincy brand. Atlas Copco plans to further develop the Quincy brand independently, in line with the Group's brand portfolio strategy. The acquired business had revenues in 2009 of MUSD 125 (MSEK 900) and an operating profit margin of approximately 7%. "I am pleased that we have obtained the approvals in the United States and can now move forward to further develop the Quincy business,” says Stephan Kuhn, President of Atlas Copco's business area Compressor Technique.

ATEC Steel acquires new Manufacturing Plant: Tank Connection Affiliate Group (TCAG) announced that their affiliate company, ATEC Steel has acquired a 60,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in Baxter Springs, KS. ATEC Steel is an industry leader in field-weld tank fabrication, specialty steel construction and field construction services in North America. ATEC products and services are routinely specified in the power, petroleum, water and wastewater, minerals and mining industries. Tank Connection and ATEC Steel are vertically integrated companies. Starting with steel procurement at the mill and finishing with construction services in the field, all value-added design, manufacturing, project management, system integration and field installation services are performed by company personnel. "While other companies have been scaling back, we are investing in the future of U.S. manufactured storage products,” stated Noel Garrett, president of ATEC Steel.

Bucyrus to acquire Mining Division of Terex: US company Bucyrus International, Inc. announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the mining equipment business of Terex Corporation for US$1.3 billion in cash. Bucyrus will offer a comprehensive product portfolio comprised of walking draglines, electric rope shovels, hydraulic excavators, off-the-highway haul trucks, highwall miners, underground longwall, room and pillar and transport machinery and a full line of drills and belt systems for all mining applications. "We are extremely excited about acquiring Terex Mining and we believe that this is a unique opportunity to build an even stronger company for our customers, employees and shareholders,” said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Bucyrus.The company says that as a result of the transaction, Bucyrus will double its addressable market from roughly US$15 billion to over US$30 billion and create a team of approximately 10,000 people in nearly 100 locations around the world.

Hillenbrand acquires K-Tron International: Hillenbrand, Inc., headquarted in Batesville, IN, acquired K-Tron International, Inc. for $150 per share in cash. This price represents a 32.1 percent premium over the closing price of K-Tron's stock on January 8, 2010, and a 38.6 percent premium over the 20-day average closing stock price. K-Tron will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Hillenbrand. "Although K-Tron's products differ from ours, we are both manufacturing companies that share similar processes and core operational values,” said to Kenneth A. Camp, Hillenbrand's president and chief executive officer. "Like our Batesville Casket business, the K-Tron operating companies are leaders in their industries and have highly effective executive management teams. K-Tron has a strong track record of delivering superior financial performance and creating significant shareholder value.” Hillenbrand, Inc. is the holding company for Batesville Casket Company, a leader in the North American death care industry through the sale of funeral services products, including burial caskets, cremation caskets, containers and urns, selection room display fixturing, and other personalization and memorialization products. K-Tron is a recognized leader in the design, production, marketing and servicing of material handling equipment and systems. The company serves many different industrial markets through two separate business lines. The Process Group focuses primarily on feeding and pneumatic conveying equipment, doing business under two main brands: K-Tron Feeders and K-Tron Premier. The Size Reduction Group concentrates on size reduction equipment, conveying systems and screening equipment, operating under three brands: Pennsylvania Crusher, Gundlach and Jeffrey Rader.

FLSmidth acquires Summit Valley Equip & Engineering: FLSmidth (Copenhagen, Denmark) has acquired the assets of Summit Valley Equipment & Engineering, located in Salt Lake City in Utah, USA. Summit Valley Equipment & Engineering (SVEE) designs and fabricates modular plants and equipment used for the extraction of gold and silver. This includes the industry's highest capacity electrowinning cell used in precious metals recovery. "With the acquisition of SVEE FLSmidth adds unique refining expertise to our existing minerals business thereby increasing our offerings to the minerals processing industries and providing a more complete flow sheet in gold and silver extraction," Group CEO Jørgen Huno Rasmussen said.

Don Dunnington
Blog Moderator