Who owns ingersoll

Three legacy Ingersoll directors will join seven Gardner directors on the new board. Reynal is moving with the headquarters to Davidson. Trane is run by Michael Lamach , who will also be in Davidson, where the Ireland-based company has its North American headquarters.

The deal was structured to make Trane a pure-play environmental innovation company focusing on heating, cooling and transport refrigeration.

It is not clear how many employees the new Ingersoll Rand will have in Davidson once the headquarters transition is complete. Please Sign In and use this article's on page print button to print this article. Largest North Carolina mergers and acquisitions in Ranked by Announced total value. Related Content.

Ingersoll Rand unveils details on new climate-control company. Under Doubleday the company never released a quarterly report and its annual report was a single folded sheet of paper containing only the figures the New York Stock Exchange required. Advances were made in the firm's products during the Doubleday years, however.

In IR introduced a new portable-compressor line, which was improved during the s with the introduction of the revolutionary sliding-vane rotary portable unit. IR began to compete in the "big drill" field in , when it introduced the Quarrymaster, which was used in quarrying, open-pit mining, and excavation. A self-propelled jumbo drill, the Drillmaster, was introduced in , followed by the Downhole drill in Doubleday also purchased General Electric's centrifugal-compressor business in , to become the leader in that sector of the business.

In the company designed the first natural gas transmission centrifugal compressors. When Doubleday retired in Ingersoll-Rand was indeed on sound financial footing. With an operating profit margin of 37 percent and a net profit margin of 19 percent, it had paid a dividend every year since , and return on stockholders' equity was 23 percent. Doubleday had reached those impressive numbers, however, by abandoning the marketing orientation that he had originally brought to the job.

By the end of his tenure he was 89 years old, and had become too conservative. The company's capital was the result of Doubleday's unwillingness to upgrade the company's plants to keep manufacturing costs low, to promote research and development to retain IR's technological edge, or to maintain sufficient foreign parts inventory to keep equipment running overseas.

He also eschewed diversification outside of IR's basic product lines. Doubleday died in , and an interim management team followed his policies for another four years. Robert H. Johnson was named chairman of the company in At 58, Johnson had spent 35 years with the company he had joined as a salesman.

Johnson cut the company's premium prices to remain competitive. Johnson put the company's excess cash--more than 65 percent of IR's total assets in to work through a policy of careful acquisitions. He invested, for example, in Lawrence Manufacturing Company, which specialized in producing mechanical moles for urban underground utility tunneling. Wearly, gave those policies new momentum.

Wearly, who took the top position in , was the first leader at IR who had not grown up with the company, another sign that it was leaving its conservative past behind. Wearly came to IR as a consultant in after leaving the presidency at Joy Manufacturing. With Wearly came a new generation of managers: President D. Wayne Hallstein was 49, while the four newest vice-presidents were under The youth of the new management team was no accident; Johnson had decided that managers who were over 55 had been too thoroughly indoctrinated in the Doubleday method of doing business and bypassed them completely.

Wearly reaped the advantages of Johnson's investment in plant and equipment, which allowed Ingersoll-Rand to increase sales--especially abroad--because of increased manufacturing capacity. Wearly then took IR into new, diversified areas to help offset the cyclical nature of the capital goods market.

The acquisition of The Torrington Company in , which brought needle and roller bearings, knitting needles, metal-forming machines, universal joints, and roller clutches to the company catalog, was especially important. So was Wearly's acquisition of the Schlage Lock Company, which produced locks, door hardware, and home and business security devices. Both acquisitions became consistent moneymakers for IR. Wearly had clearly moved away from the company's tradition of operating paternalistic plants in small towns.

By the early s IR operated 36 plants in the United States and 17 abroad. One of them, its Roanoke, Virginia, plant, became the first factory in the country to use computerized direct numerical control of a production line. The plant used a computer to run machine tools and to automatically move parts from one tool to another on conveyer belts without human assistance. The new Roanoke facility took over much of the capacity of the old Athens, Pennsylvania, plant, which had been crippled by strikes and rising labor costs.

In the company had threatened to leave Athens if the union did not make significant concessions on work methods, and IR had won the new five-year contract it wanted.

A decade later those union concessions were not forthcoming, and the Athens plant was substantially bypassed--by a mechanized system instead of by other workers. Wearly's policies seemed destined to pay off in the early s, when factors such as the search for new energy sources, Mideastern oil money, growing East-West trade, and Third World industrialization led to increased demand for almost all Ingersoll-Rand products.

Five years later, the boom turned into a bust. Capital spending had slowed after the energy crisis of Coal and railroad strikes hurt the company because it was still a major supplier of coal-mining machinery. All of these factors left IR with too much capacity and too much inventory. Holmes convinced Clyde Folley, a member of Price Waterhouse's governing board who had worked on the IR account, to become chief financial officer. The two executives faced the global recession and resulting fall in earnings and sales, especially of oil drilling and construction equipment.

As a result, the company closed 30 production plants and cut staff by one-third. The company's tight cash supply was spent only in the areas where returns were highest--bearings, locks, and tools--rather than on the traditional focus areas of the company--engineered equipment, coal mining equipment, and air compressors.

Holmes and Folley tied management compensation to return on assets instead of sales to promote more efficient asset use, and centralized inventory controls. Holmes, Folley, and Theodore Black then initiated joint ventures with competitors. One of the most important of these ventures was Dresser-Rand, a partnership formed in with Dresser Industries, another major mining- and oil-equipment company.

Almost immediately successful, Dresser-Rand turned a profit in only its second year of operation. In IR formed another joint venture in mining with B. Folley said the joint ventures allowed the company to cut staff and losses while competing more effectively with Japanese and West German companies. Pooling talent also helped the firms stay current technologically. IR had once again weathered recession by the time Holmes stepped down in His successor, Theodore Black, was able to focus on significant positive aspects of the company.

IR continued to emphasize new product development, introducing improved home air compressors, new papermaking technology, and a new type of camshaft in IR also continued to make appropriate acquisitions, including a Swedish company that designed waterjet cutting systems, a Canadian manufacturer of paving equipment, and a German maker of special-purpose hydraulic rock drills, in In , the company purchased The Aro Corporation, one of its larger acquisitions of the period.

IR continued to utilize state-of-the-art computerized production and design techniques. New techniques that utilize manufacturing cells to produce a product from start to finish with much less labor than a production line were able to produce more, higher-quality goods. Part of the credit for IR's success was attributed to its geographical diversity. In the early s only 30 percent of the company's sales were attributable to products manufactured outside the United States, but through a variety of acquisitions thereafter that percentage had increased to 70 percent by The Dresser-Rand partnership also was paying off huge dividends on the home front.

Dresser Industries and Ingersoll-Rand recognized another possible area of cooperation in within their then-competitive industrial pump manufacturing operations. The companies agreed in May of that year to combine their pump divisions into one organization that could better compete against competitors in Japan and Germany. The U. Justice Department initially opposed the joint venture under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Dresser and IR countered by contending that the Justice Department had to take the impact of foreign competition into account. Perrella, a year veteran of the firm. Several smaller acquisitions in and served to increase IR's presence in the European market and brought additional complementary businesses into the company fold. These moves included the acquisitions of the France-based Montabert S. One of IR's most important acquisitions of this period came the following year when it purchased Clark Equipment Company, the South Bend, Indiana, manufacturer of small and medium-sized construction machines.

A Clark acquisition was seen as a particularly complementary one, given Clark's focus on construction and IR's construction-related lines, which comprised only about 18 percent of company sales prior to the takeover. Before the acquisition was completed, however, IR had to fend off Clark's management, which did not wish to relinquish control.