Injection molder Oneida Molded Plastics LLC has a new owner.
Cedar Ridge Holding Co. is buying Oneida, which specializes in products for outdoor recreation, general industrial and military, from Argosy Private Equity.
Cedar Ridge, of Mankato, Minn., pointed to Oneida's management and employees as part of the reason for making the deal.
"We're really excited to partner with an exceptional management team that really has grown the business into a market leader within the outdoor recreational industry. So we recognize the great job that they've done in the last couple of years. And we feel we can continue building that momentum," Cedar Ridge Management Partner Darren Brathol said in a Sept. 3 interview.
Brathol co-owns Cedar Ridge with Blake Hermel, also a managing partner. He pointed to Oneida's "significant market share in the recreational outdoor industry" in the acquisition announcement.
Argosy is exiting its OMP investment after more than 15 years. The private equity firm was part of a 2006 transaction that saw Reunion Industries Inc. sell its ORC Plastics Division to the newly formed OMP.
OMP, at the time, also had operations in Phoenix, N.Y., and Siler City, N.C., but the sites eventually were consolidated into the company's Oneida, N.Y., facility.
OMP traces its roots to 1964 and originally focused on electronics. Now the company calls itself "one of the premier firearms components suppliers in the world" that now has customers in both the U.S. military and outdoor recreational products industries.
OMP operates out of an 84,000-square-foot facility with 36 injection molding presses ranging from 35 to 700 tons of clamping force, according to the company's website.
Aside from making components for outdoor recreation, other important markets include electronics, automotive, health care and fitness, the company said.
"OMP has a strong and entrenched position within its core outdoor recreation segment and offers robust precision component manufacturing capabilities," Managing Director David Evatz at Stout Investment Banking, an investment bank and advisory firm that worked on the deal, in a statement.
Hermel, in a post on LinkedIn, indicated more than 200 people work at OMP.
"Cedar Ridge is a new private investment firm. We're focused on building generational companies. Our plan is to invest in the people, the equipment, the processes with an indefinite time horizon," Brathol said. "We feel that the long-term hold strategy is a little bit better and more favorable for us as investors and what we're looking to accomplish."
Cedar Ridge will now seek to expand the business through internal investment as well as "opportunistic add-on acquisitions that make sense to us," Brathol said.
The new company owners were particularly attracted to OMP's management capabilities and experience.
"We do have experience in prior lives with plastic parts, whether it [has] been injection molding, blown film, compounding. We're familiar and comfortable with the plastics industry in general, especially as it relates to the outdoor segment," Brathol said.