For injection molding, ‘little' isn't the same as ‘not big'

I call this week's ranking, the "Little North American Injection Molders Ranking."

These are the companies with related sales smaller than the top 100 cut off at $72 million that ran in last week's print issue, with 481 firms combining to hit a total of $8.5 billion in sales. That's up 0.8 percent, right in line with the Top 100 with 0.7 percent.

But the true comparison of results may lie in the average sales per company. The top 100 is up 6.9 percent while the littlest gain is less than 1 percent, nearly 10 times less. We look at percentages as a way of ironing out the disparity, this gives us a relatable point of comparison, since our biggest gain here is $17 million, while the top 100 was $275 million. This week's ranking is 4-and-a-half times larger in count. That's a big power base, and calling them little makes me chuckle.

When molders report major changes in sales we look for supporting data to help explain the differences. Higher sales generally mean capacity gains or acquisitions. Looking again at the averages per company, for those reporting figures, the number of presses is up 2 percent while the number of employees is down 4.5 percent.

California comes as the third most popular state for plant location vs. Wisconsin for headquarter bases.

Only 4 percent of ranked firms have presses with large clamp-tonnage capability of 1,200 or more.

Teel Plastics LLC of Baraboo, Wis., comes in with the highest percentage gain of 178 percent.

Biggest movers:

• Creative Liquid Coatings Inc. of Kendallville, Ind., moved up 109 spaces to rank at No. 204.

• Mother Lode Plastics Molding Inc., dba Central Plastics & Manufacturing, of Tracy, Calif., moved up 95 spaces to rank at No. 338.

• Midwest Precision Molding of Lake Geneva, Wis., moved up 91 spaces to 316.

And now a few words on our annual drive to grow our lists, you knew this was coming, right?

It's a huge challenge to find and report on as many molders as we can, and this year 590 companies made the list, with 582 listing process data. Our active database has twice as many more who didn't respond.

Every day we report the news from the plastics industry, anyone not already in the database gets flagged for a survey. Each year, we send these out by mail and email. If you're not on the list, we want to include you too.

To help, please do check your websites for email addresses that are undeliverable. Please accept emails from Crain, our parent company's email server. Please respond even if you wish to decline participation, because it's the best way we know of to aggregate and report statistics on plastics processing.

So if you don't see your firm on this list, send a note to Hollee Keller at [email protected] or complete our survey form. You can find it online at www.plasticsnews.com/rankings-survey-forms.

Subscribers can view the full ranking online at www.plasticsnews.com/injection-molders. Upgrade your account to a data level subscription to get unlimited MS Excel downloads of all our rankings and lists. For more information send a note to [email protected].

Keller is editorial research coordinator for Plastics News and author of the All Things Data blog. Follow her on Twitter @holleekeller.