DEARBORN, MICH. — Six months after forming a plastics trade association, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers has acquired Plastics World and Plastics Formulating & Compounding magazines.
SME acquired Plastics World ``effective with the November '97 issue,'' according to a news release obtained by Plastics News. Starting with that November issue, the monthly magazine will be renamed Molding Systems.
Plastics News obtained a copy of an SME press release, dated Sept. 23, from a third party, but SME spokesman Glenn Strong refused to comment or answer questions about it. SME publications director John Coleman and several other SME officials did not return telephone calls for this story.
Dearborn-based SME bought the two plastics magazines from Cygnus Publishing Inc., which had owned them a few months. In a deal announced June 6, St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Cygnus bought PTN Publishing Co. of Melville, N.Y., which published more than 50 magazines, including those two.
Plastics World is one of the oldest plastics trade magazines, having been published under that name since Cleworth Publishing Co. founded the magazine in 1942.
The SME news release said SME is changing the publication's name to Molding Systems, to reflect the industry's greater emphasis on the need for a systems approach to plastics manufacturing. SME said Plastics World has a circulation of 51,500.
SME will publish Plastics Formulating & Compounding three times in 1998, in March, July and November, as a ``stand-alone supplement, packaged with Molding Systems.'' The compounding magazine will have a circulation of 16,500.
SME, which has 70,000 members worldwide, got into the plastics trade association business this year, by forming the Plastics Molders & Manufacturers Association. SME announced the new group, known as PMMA/SME, in late March. About 60 percent of its members are injection molders.
SME already puts out three magazines: Manufacturing Engineering, Forming & Fabricating and Integrated Design & Manufacturing. Manufacturing Engineering began in 1932, according to SME.
