Less than three years after acquiring the business, troubled conglomerate Tyco International Ltd. is closing a 180-employee plastics cutlery and film plant in Louisville, Ky.
The shutdown will begin Dec. 2 and should be completed by the end of January, officials said. Employees were told of the decision in September. Tyco, with its U.S. base in Exeter, N.H., acquired the business in mid-2000 from Amcel Corp. of Watertown, Mass.
Film equipment and production - mostly of trash bags - will be handled at Tyco blown film plants in Macedon, N.Y.; Thomasville, N.C.; and Sioux Falls, S.D. Some of the Louisville site's cutlery production will be moved to a Tyco plant in Breman, Ga., with the remainder being outsourced from China.
Officials said the closing is not connected to Tyco's much-publicized struggles, including the arrests of former Chief Executive Officer L. Dennis Kozlowski and former Chief Financial Officer Mark Swartz for allegedly taking $600 million from the firm.
Production details from the Louisville site were unavailable. Most recently, Amcel added three extrusion lines and two injection molding presses at the site in 1998.
The Amcel buy was one of three major film deals Tyco made in 2000, when it also bought Mohawk Plastics Inc. of Riviera, Beach, Fla., and North American Plastics Corp. of Aurora, Ill. Those three deals boosted Tyco's film sales by almost $160 million.