Kickstart: Back to work at Baxter

Baxter International Inc. restarted production on one of the lines of its IV solutions plant in Marion, N.C., about a month after floods from Hurricane Helene damaged the facility and roads leading to it.

And while that is important for the company and the national IV supply — Baxter is a key company in the U.S. medical industry for IV solutions — what may be more important to the workforce as a whole is that all of the more than 2,500 workers at the site are safe and are back on the job.

They may not be making medical products yet, but in an Oct. 31 update, the company says its employees are providing manpower for remediation work at the site.

Baxter has also donated about $4 million to relief programs while an employee support center provides food, water, toiletries, access to portable generators, showers, credit union services, internet access and laptop workstations.

Honda Motor Co. already had close links to Asahi Kasei Corp.'s planned battery film separator plant in Ontario since it was first announced in April as a key customer.

Now the two companies are making it official, announcing an agreement to convert the E-Materials Canada Corp. subsidiary of Asahi Kasei to be built in Port Colborne, Ontario, into a joint venture between the materials company and Honda to be renamed Asahi Kasei Honda Battery Separator Corp. (That's the tentative name anyway.)

Honda will pay about $300 million for a 25 percent stake in the business that will produce Hipore-brand polyeolefin separators for EVs, the companies said Nov. 1.

Asahi Kasei first announced plans to build a separator plant in April just as Honda said it would spend $11 billion in Ontario to develop "a comprehensive EV value chain in Canada … for the procurement of raw materials mainly for batteries to the production of finished EVs."

The $1.1 billion separator plant will have annual production capacity of more than 1.5 billion pounds of coated film for battery separators. Production is expected to begin in 2027.

The project already had a high profile before Honda officially joined it as a JV. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke at an event when Asahi Kasei announced the plant's location.

Honda isn't the only company investing in vertical integration.

Global foam manufacturing company Carpenter Co. has acquired Casper Sleep Inc., a top "bed-in-a-box" brand in the U.S.

Carpenter and Casper already had a supply agreement. Now Carpenter will assist its new subsidiary "on a comprehensive growth and profitability strategy, as well as the appropriate future channels to market." Carpenter already is one of the top global suppliers to the bedding industry.

Neither company had much to say on the record about the sale, issuing only a three-sentence news release about the acquisition, but it should provide some stability for Casper as well as a strong consumer presence for Carpenter.

Casper was a pioneer in the e-commerce sale of mattresses, but it has gone through a lot of ownership changes in the past few years. It went public in 2020, trading under the ticker symbol CSPR, only to be picked up by private equity group Durational Capital Management about a year later.