New York equity firm acquires Ontario farm implement manufacturer
Monday, November 25, 2013
by SUSAN MANN
A New York-based private equity firm has become the largest shareholder in Ontario-based Salford Farm Machinery Ltd. but it will be business as usual for the farm implement manufacturer, says a Salford spokesman.
Anson Boak, marketing manager, says Salford has been on a rapid expansion track and as “we’re getting into new markets in the United States and internationally and increasing the overall size of the company, we were looking for an investor that could help us continue our pace of growth.”
That partner is GenNx360 Capital Partners, a firm that’s focused on investing in middle market industrial business-to-business companies. The firm has headquarters in New York with additional offices in Seattle and Boston.
GenNx360 Capital Partners bought out a few of the existing shareholders at Salford and is now the main shareholder in the private company, Boak says. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed.
“What’s unique about GenNx360 is they have a lot of operational experience mostly coming from senior management in different parts of GE (General Electric),” he says. “They’re used to operating on a pretty large scale and looking for efficiencies in manufacturing and operations in each facility. With their engineering background they can contribute to the growth of the business as well.”
Boak says Salford has gained both an investor and a company with operational experience “to bring things up to a larger scale here.”
Founded in 1978, Salford Farm Machinery is one of North America’s leading manufacturers of non-powered farm implements, including primary and secondary tillage, seeding and fertilizing equipment. Salford designs, manufacturers and assembles farm equipment. It serves the North American and European markets from facilities in Ontario (just outside the of Salford in Oxford County), Iowa in the United States and with a joint venture in Omsk, Russia. The company sells equipment through more than 300 dealers and distributors in North America.
The Salford facility in Ontario is slightly more than 100,000 square feet in size. Salford employs about 150 people in Ontario, including its outside sales force. The Iowa plant employs about 50 people, and in Russia 40 people are employed.
Salford has plans to grow its facilities in both Ontario and Iowa.
Salford’s current operations will continue uninterrupted from the company’s existing headquarters with the current entire staff staying in place. “It’s really just about adding their (GenNx360) operational expertise. They’re very well connected so we’re getting some access to some experts in agricultural sales and marketing that we wouldn’t typically have had access to,” Boak notes.
He explains GenNx360 “believes in the Salford brand and the growth that we have to date and they’re committed to maintaining the brand and keeping it up.”
Boak says Salford officials did quite a bit of research over a year to determine if GenNx360 was the type of company they wanted investing in their company. “We’ve looked for investors in the past and found we were sitting across boardroom tables from bankers, who didn’t understand much about the farm industry or the manufacturing operations that we do here.”
But GenNx360 wants to learn about agriculture and “they kind of wrote the book about manufacturing from GE’s (General Electric’s) perspective,” he says.
Carmen Rojas, investor relation manager for GenNx360, couldn’t be reached for comment. BF