Griffon exploring a sale for Clopay Plastics

News of the potential acquisition comes as Griffon also revealed a $260 million move to buy ClosetMaid Corp., a home storage and organization products company, in an unrelated move.Clopay Plastics, in recent years, has improved performance. And that is now attracting attention from others interested in the operations.We're very pleased with the improvement of operating performance and believe it's a compelling asset with innovative products, a rationalized footprint and longstanding, blue-chip customers," CEO Ron Kramer said on a Sept. 6 conference call.

To that point, the industry has taken note of these improvements and we've received several qualified, unsolicited bids for the company," he said.Clopay Plastics has served Griffon well since being acquired in 1986, but now is the time to look at selling, the CEO said.We believe Clopay Plastics will provide incremental value under ownership that is focused solely on the packaging and plastics market and is able to provide operational scale and additional resources to realize increased growth and profitability," Kramer said.Griffon was not looking to sell Clopay Plastics before offers starting coming in.

And while news of the possible sale comes at the same time as the ClosetMaid acquisition, the two moves should be viewed as independent events, the company said.We believe that we're on a time frame that there's real interest that we're going to explore," Kramer said about potentially divesting Clopay Plastics.Who knows what's going to happen over a period of time?" he said. "I won't give you an exact timeline because it's pointless. But we expect to be working on this immediately.Clopay Plastics films serve the hygiene, health care, building and construction and industrial protective apparel markets, the company said. Clopay Plastics makes films and laminates, including elastic, breathable and printed offerings.The company also makes apertured film and laminate, which has openings and is sold into the feminine care, baby care, adult incontinence and health care markets.

The company's corporate headquarters are in Mason, Ohio, and it has manufacturing sites in Nashville, Tenn., and Augusta,Internationally, the company has sites in: São Paulo; Aschersleben, Hessen and Dombühl, Germany; and Suzhou, China.New York-based Griffon calls itself a diversified management and holding company with a varied portfolio that includes Ames tools and landscaping products. The company also owns Telephonics, which provides electronic information and communication systems for defense, aerospace, civil, industrial and commercial applications, the company said.The firm's Clopay Building Products unit, which makes garage doors, entry doors and commercial overhead doors, is separate from Clopay Plastics and not part of the potential divestiture, the company said.Clopay Plastics had sales of $468 million for the 12 months ended June 30, and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $53 million.