Shipping firm A&R Logistics Inc. has a new name as it continues to look for more acquisitions.
A&R, based in The Woodlands, Texas, on Sept. 8 rebranded itself as Quantix. In a news release, officials said that the name unites all of A&R's companies into a single brand. The firm has made several acquisitions since being purchased by Chicago private equity firm Wind Point Partners in May 2019 and now has annual sales of more than $500 million.
In a Sept. 7 phone interview, President and CEO Chris Ball said that businesses acquired by A&R had been operating under their original names. That practice was leading to confusion with some customers, he said.
Operating under the Quantix name "is good for the industry because of our scale and what we can do," said Ball, who was named president in 2020 and added the CEO title in June.
Officials added that Quantix is a chemistry-inspired name that's a spin on the term quantum, which is a discrete packet of energy or matter. The name "embodies the company's intention to be the source of energy that keeps driving the chemical logistics industry forward towards seamless, holistic, customer-centric logistics solutions."
Ball added in the release that the rebranding "will continue to pay homage to A&R's 50-year history during which we became a leader in this industry."
According to company officials, Quantix is the industry's largest dry bulk transportation network with more than 2,300 pieces of highly specialized equipment. The firm also is one of the largest liquid chemical transportation platforms in the U.S. with more than 2,000 pieces of equipment.
Quantix offers warehousing, rail distribution and inventory management via a national network of 33 facilities totaling more than 6 million square feet. The firm also has export packaging capabilities with the capacity to handle more than 34,000 rail cars of resin annually.
A&R made a major plastics acquisition in November 2019 when it bought Houston-based Plantgistix, which operates three major resin shipping centers in that region. Plantgistix traced its history to the early days of the U.S. plastics industry, when brothers Harry and Louis Levine founded injection molder Commonwealth Plastics in Leominster, Mass., in the 1930s.
A&R in April acquired Luckey Trucking, a chemicals shipping firm based in Streator, Ill. In November 2020, A&R opened a 615,000-square-foot export facility in Moncks Corner, S.C.
Ball said Sept. 7 that more deals could be on the horizon for Quantix.
"We're still looking and we have a robust pipeline," he added. "We want to be the leader in chemical logistics."