The acquisitive Columbus McKinnon Corporation (CMCO) has taken over the privately-owned industrial overhead bridge and jib crane builder GL International of Texas. The 1 March acquisition came just two weeks after CMCO announced that it had bought Camlok Lifting Clamps and the Tigrip product line from Germany’s Schmidt-Krantz & Co for $10.6m.
GL is one of North America’s largest full service crane builders and generated sales of $53m in the nine months to 31 December 1998. It was formed in 1997 from the merger of Gaffey, which services industrial crane and hoist customers in southern USA, and Larco, a Canadian specialist in large, engineered cranes across North America.
CMCO paid GL’s owners shares and options to a value of $20.6m and assumed debt of $10.9m.
Camlok manufactures plate clamps for lifting sheets of steel, crane weighers and related products and is based in Chester in the UK, while the Tigrip line of plate clamps is produced in Germany. Together they generated $6.3m revenues last year.
Camlock and Tigrip are to be combined with and managed by Yale Industrial Products GmbH, the German operation of CMCO subsidiary Yale.
CMCO has grown significantly through acquisitions in recent years. It paid $7m for Abell-Howe Crane in the USA last August, $155m for LICO in March 1998, $270m for Yale in October 1996, and $63m for Lift-Tech in November 1995.
