If you plan to be on either side of a merger or acquisition, experience can be your most valuable partner. It can pay to listen closely to what active buyers and sellers have to say about what they did right, and what they would never do again.
That's the purpose of convening a March 1 panel of M&A veterans at Plastics News' Executive Forum 2005 in Phoenix. Industry participants include Alan Johnson, president and chief operating officer of automotive injection molder Plastech Engineered Products Inc., and Mark Leiden, vice president of global marketing, strategic planning and investor relations at blow molding giant Graham Packaging Co. LP.
Johnson has been on both ends of deals, having been an acquirer when he was a senior official at Federal-Mogul Corp. and the acquired when Dearborn, Mich.-based Plastech last year bought LDM Technologies Inc., while he was LDM's president and chief executive officer. Leiden - a late panel replacement for Graham Chairman and CEO Philip Yates - joined York, Pa.-based Graham in 1999 after working many years for Alcoa and then for Schmalbach-Lubeca White Cap. Leiden has been one of the architects of the strategy to expand Graham's PET bottle business, which recently paid more than $1 billion to acquire most of the blow molding assets of Owens-Illinois Inc.
They will be joined by three financial executives - Jeff McKenzie, a managing director at Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin in Los Angeles, Ian Morton, a partner at Crimson Investment in Palo Alto, Calif., and panel moderator David Solomon, New York-based managing director and partner of Goldsmith Agio Helms.
Full program details for the Feb. 27-March 2 forum and an online registration form are available at www.plasticsnews.com/forum2005.