Rubber & Plastics News compiled its 10 biggest stories from 2018, and we counted them down in our Dec. 10 print issue. We'll be running them online each workday until the end of the year.
7. Big year for mergers
Companies were not shy about spending money.
Maybe they had a little extra cash thanks to the tax cuts passed at the end of 2017, or maybe business was particularly good. Whatever the case, buyers spent big and sellers seemed particularly obliged to take the money in 2018.
We'd probably need the whole issue to go through all the merger and acquisition activity that occurred in 2018. Other notable deals included: Megadyne agreeing to merge with Ammeraal; TransDigm bought Esterline's Kirkhill unit in April, then came back to buy the rest of Esterline in October; Trelleborg acquired Sil-Pro in August, just after Sil-Pro added 10 machines earlier in the year; Mearthane bought Creative Urethanes; JDS bought Omega; Minnesota Rubber & Plastics swapped private equity owners; and Universal Polymer & Rubber bought Gasko Fabricated Products, its third company in four years.
That's not the complete list, and you can find more sector-specific deals throughout our year in review, but enough to make a point: Companies weren't sitting on cash in 2018.