TriMas buys Intertech Plastics as it builds exposure in medical market

TriMas Corp. is on the acquisition trail again, buying Intertech Plastics LLC, a Denver-based injection molder that was Plastics News' 2019 Processor of the Year.

Intertech is well known in plastics circles for its Swiss-style apprentice programs. The company is a high-volume, high-cavitation specialist with significant medical and packaging customers.

TriMas is a publicly traded company based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. It serves consumer, aerospace and industrial markets, with about 3,300 employees in 11 countries.

The deal is TriMas' sixth packaging company acquisition since early 2019, and its second of an injection molder with medical customers. The most recent was the December purchase of Omega Plastics Inc. in Clinton Township, Mich.

TriMas President and CEO Thomas Amato said both Intertech and Omega have medical and life science customers that fit well with Trimas' pharmaceutical and nutraceutical lines, which generate about $25 million in annual sales.

"We've been studying penetrating these product areas for some time," Amato said in a March 1 call with analysts. "Typically, larger deals are very difficult to acquire, they tend to have a lot of competition. So we have been focusing on more manageable acquisitions, in terms of their size and bolt-on capability for us."

Even before TriMas closed on buying Omega, "we were looking at Intertech, and we thought it was incredibly compelling to put these companies together," Amato said.

He added that both the Omega and Intertech deals required "a lot of work" to close.

"In both the cases of Omega and Intertech, the owners were extremely, extremely passionate about their businesses and the processes for us to work with the owners and have them decide to select TriMas as a company to allow their — in many cases — their babies, to enter that next phase of development, were lengthy processes, and took the most senior levels of our company, myself and our president of our packaging group, Fabio Salik, working on these deals personally," Amato said.

Terms of the deals were not disclosed, but Amato said they were sold for "nice-sized multiples, they're premium multiples" of EBITDA, but not as high as analysts would expect for a larger business with $200 million in sales, or with 100 percent focus on the medical technology market.

Intertech was represented by Chicago-based Stout Investment Banking, with Managing Director Mike Benson leading the deal team.

Intertech will become part of TriMas Packaging, effective immediately. Jim Kepler, Intertech's president and shareholder, along with the Intertech leadership team, will stay on with the company and will report to Salik.

Intertech was founded by Noel Ginsburg in 1980. The company has two factories, several blocks apart, in Denver. Both do custom injection molding. The company significantly expanded its medical molding plant in 2021, adding clean room production capabilities, gowning and ante rooms, nine new 300-ton machines, LED lighting and a HEPA HVAC filtration system.

Intertech generated about $32 million in 2021 sales, according to TriMas.

Ginsburg drafted the plan for an injection molding company in 1979 for a class he was taking at the University of Denver. He founded Intertech — it was initially named Container Industries — a year later, when he bought the assets of a local molding plant that was closing.

Ginsburg has not run the day-to-day operations since 2018, when he made an unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination for governor of Colorado. In recent years his attention has been on CareerWise USA, a nonprofit he started to expand U.S. apprentice programs.

That's why it made sense to sell Intertech now, Ginburg told the Denver Business Journal.

"We were looking for a buyer that wasn't private equity and was interested in the company as a platform to grow from," Ginsburg said. "TriMas literally checked all the boxes for where I wanted things to go."