Kickstart: Happy M&A season

'Tis the season for mergers and acquisitions.

With 2020 creaking its way toward an end (finally), we're seeing a lot of companies announcing acquisitions. Just this week, we've had M&As from Singapore-based medical molder Sunningdale buying Arizona's Moldworx for its first U.S. production, Graham Partners buying Berry Global Group's flexible packaging converting business, ProAmpac picking up three Canadian companies with the purchase of umbrella company Rosenbloom Groupe, Spectrum Plastics Group adding PeelMaster Medical Packaging to its portfolio, an Israeli private equity company purchasing StePac L.A. LLC as the platform for future acquisitions, PPC Flexible Packaging acquiring Custom Poly Bag Inc. and the plastics-adjacent research industry acquisition of IHS Markit by S&P.

That isn't necessarily unusual. Every year companies push to complete acquisitions before the end of the fiscal calendar. This year is different because travel shut down acquisition-related visits, but they did not stop. Moldworx founder and owner Jim Taylor noted that Sunningdale continued its research into the company via the internet.

"It was unreal," Taylor told Don Loepp. "All the rest of the contact was via phone, email, video conferencing. The group from Singapore still can't travel. As a matter of fact, we have moved into a new facility that they have only seen through video."

So one thing is clear: Expect to hear more M&A news in the coming few weeks, even in an unusual year.

Hong Kong-based Techtronic Industries (TTI) made a lot of headlines about 15 years ago when it acquired, then closed, vacuum cleaner brand Hoover only to close production in North Canton, Ohio. It later shuttered production in El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, including more than 100 injection molding plants.

Now TTI, which also owns the Oreck and Dirt Devil vacuum brands along with consumer products marketed under the Milwaukee and Ryobi names, is ready to invest $100 million and create 525 jobs in Anderson, S.C., the South Carolina Department of Commerce announced Dec. 1.

It's not clear yet if TTI plans to bring back molding to the U.S. as part of the project, although the state said it will include a "1 million-square-foot manufacturing plant and warehouse to support production and assembly operations."

Light 70 candles for the Plastics Pipe Institute. The group formed in 1950 as the thermoplastic pipe division of what was then called the Society of the Plastics Industry (now the Plastics Industry Association).

In 1950, plastic pipe was still in its infancy, the group noted, having been developed during World War II as a way to insulate radar cables. Solid-wall high-density polyethylene pipe began replacing metal pipe in oil- and gas-gathering systems in the late 1950s and has grown into other markets since then.